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Rebecca Lee Crumpler is best known for being the first African-American woman physician in the United States.
She was born in Delaware in 1831, but grew up in Pennsylvania. She spent a lot of time with her aunt, who cared for the ill, while she was growing up. Crumpler later attended the elite West Newton English and Classical School in Massachusetts where she was a "special student in mathematics."
She worked as a nurse in Charlestown, Massachusetts until she was accepted to the New England Female Medical College in 1861. Very rarely were women or black men let into the school. In the U.S. at that time, there were more than 50,000 physicians, 300 of which were women – none of those were women of color, however.
She won a tuition award from the Wade Scholarship Fund, which was established by the Ohio abolitionist, Benjamin Wade. She became the first African-American woman to be named a doctor of Medicine in 1864. She was also the only African-American woman to earn a full degree from the college, as it later closed and eventually merged with Boston University.
She opened a medical practice in Boston after graduation and stayed there until the end of the Civil War. Then, she and her husband moved to Richmond, Virginia where she recalled that she began “the proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children.”
Crumpler worked under General Orlando Brown, the Assistant Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau for the State of Virginia. This federal agency charged with helping more than 4,000,000 slaves make the stunning transition from bondage to freedom. In Richmond, she was faced with racism, mistreatment, sexism, and general unwanted behavior, all of which she ignored, in order to treat as she later wrote, “a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored.”
She then returned to practice in Boston for a short time, and then eventually settled in Hyde Park, New York. Moving to New York could be considered her retirement, though in this time she wrote a notable book, “A Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts,” which was published by Cashman, Keating and Co., of Boston, in 1883. The book focused on the medical care of women and children, the kind of care that sparked her interest in medicine.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/celebrating-rebecca-lee-crumpler-first-african-american-physician/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Lee_Crumpler
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Re: Woman of the Week – Rebecca Lee Crumpler
