African American Doctors

Name: Date: AFRICAN AMERICAN DOCTORS Written by Amena Brown 1010L-12000L In the spirit of honoring African American culture and accomplishments, we look to medicine’s past to highlight the countless achievements and barriers broken by Black physicians in America. There are hundreds of countless African American medical pioneers; however, we will look at only three who have made history. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African American woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. She was also one of the first African Americans to write a medical book. Rebecca Davis was born on February 8, 1831, in Delaware. She was raised by an aunt in Pennsylvania. Her aunt often cared for sick neighbors. This influenced Rebecca’s decision to pursue a career in medicine. In 1852 she moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts. She worked as a nurse there until 1860. In 1860 Rebecca was admitted to the New England Female Medical College. She graduated with a medical degree in 1864. That year she also married Arthur Crumpler. Crumpler practiced medicine for a short time in Boston, Massachusetts, before she moved to Richmond, Virginia, in 1865. The American Civil War had just ended and slavery was over. Crumpler recognized the need for urgent medical care among the newly freed enslaved people in Richmond, so she worked with many missionary and Black community groups to help them. Crumpler returned to Boston by 1869. She established a practice and focused on studying the illnesses affecting poor women and children. Her work, A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Parts (1883), addresses women and children’s health. Crumpler died on March 9, 1895, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Francis Sumner, PhD, is referred to as the “Father of Black Psychology” because he was the first African American to receive a PhD degree in psychology. Sumner was born in Arkansas in 1895. As a teenager without a high school education, he was able to pass an entrance exam to Lincoln University and graduate magna cum laude with honors. He later enrolled at Clark University to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1916. After graduation he returned to Lincoln as a graduate student and was mentored by Stanley Hall. Although he was approved as a PhD candidate, he could not begin his doctoral dissertation because he was drafted into the army during World War I. Upon returning from the war, he re-enrolled in the doctoral program at Clark and in 1920 his dissertation titled "Psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler" was accepted. Sumner became a professor at various universities and managed to publish several articles despite the refusal of research agencies to provide funding for him because of his color. An adaption from MDLinx “10 History-Making Black Physicians“ (2021) He was interested in understanding racial bias and supporting educational justice. Sumner is also credited as one of the founders of the psychology department at Howard University, which he chaired from 1928 until his death in 1954. Daniel Hale Williams is credited with performing the world’s first successful heart surgery. He also founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, the country’s first hospital owned and run by African Americans. Williams was born on January 18, 1858, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Chicago Medical College (now the medical school of Northwestern University) in 1883. In response to the lack of opportunity for African Americans in the medical professions, Williams founded Provident Hospital in 1891. It provided training for Black interns and included a school for Black nurses, the first school of its kind in the United States. After serving as a surgeon at Provident in 1892–93, Williams became surgeon in chief of Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. There he established another school for black nurses. In 1898 Williams returned to Provident, where he worked as a surgeon until 1912. It was at Provident Hospital that Williams performed daring heart surgery on July 10, 1893. At the time, medical opinion disapproved of surgical treatment of heart wounds. Nevertheless, Williams opened the patient’s chest cavity, without the aid of blood transfusions or modern anesthetics or antibiotics. During the surgery, he examined the heart, sewed up a wound of the sac surrounding the heart, and closed the chest. The patient lived for at least 20 years following the surgery. This operation is cited as the first recorded repair of the sac enclosing the heart. QUESTIONS Directions: Write in complete sentences. Be sure to use evidence from the text to support your response. 1.What is the main idea from the text “African American Doctors”? 2. Compare to of the doctors from "African American Doctors", what did they have in common? .

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