Honoring Black Americans’ Contributions to Medicine

Rebecca Lee Crumpler, MD (1831 — 1895)
Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler worked as a nurse for almost 10 years before becoming the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. Dr. Crumpler worked as a nurse and physician in Massachusetts and Virginia and focused her practice on women and children. In 1883, she published what is believed to be the first medical text written by a Black author. The book addressed the treatment and prevention of diseases in women and children.

Otis Boykin (1920–1982)
Born in Dallas, Otis Boykin went to work in Chicago after undergraduate school and then started graduate studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology but had to drop out because he couldn’t cover tuition. Instead, he started working on his own inventions and throughout his career, he ultimately patented 28 electronic devices. Boykin developed resistors for electronic components that made the production of televisions and computers much more affordable. But he became best known for improving the pacemaker.

James McCune Smith, MD (1813 — 1865)
In 1837, James McCune Smith, MD, became the first Black American to receive a medical degree. He was also the first Black person to own and operate a pharmacy in the United States and the first Black physician to be published in U.S. medical journals. Smith used his writing talents to challenge racist notions about African Americans, most notably he debunked such theories in Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia.”

The Black Angels
As tuberculosis was ravaging New York City in the early 1900s, patients could not stay in regular hospitals. The Sea View hospital in Staten Island, a tuberculosis facility that opened in 1913, ended up caring for thousands of patients who were unable to afford care at more expensive sanitariums. The Black Angels were Black nurses who cared for tuberculosis patients at Seaview Hospital in Staten Island, New York, from 1928 to 1960. Throughout their decades of work at Seaview, the Black Angels contributed to the development of Isoniazid, an antibiotic to treat tuberculosis, by administering the drug to patients and collecting massive amounts of data on how it affected them. In 1951, this data was part of a breakthrough trial showing the effectiveness of Isoniazid in treating the disease.

Alexa Irene Canady (b. 1950)
Dr. Alexa Irene Canady, almost dropped out of college when she started her undergraduate degree. But she pressed on and discovered her love of medicine working on genetics research. In 1981, she became the first female African American neurosurgeon in the United States. Her research on children includes studies on the effects of hydrocephalus, a condition characterized by the excessive accumulation of fluid in the brain.

Leonidas Harris Berry (1902 — 1995)
Even as a renowned gastroenterologist, Leonidas Harris Berry, MD, faced racism in the workplace. Berry was the first Black doctor on staff at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, in 1946, but he had to fight for an attending position there for years. He was finally named to the attending staff in 1963 and remained a senior attending physician for the rest of his medical career. In the 1950s, Berry chaired a Chicago commission that worked to make hospitals more inclusive for Black physicians and to increase facilities in underserved parts of the city.

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire (b. 1986)
As a senior research fellow and the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines and Immunopathogenesis Team in the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Corbett-Helaire was in the perfect position to quickly respond to the virus quickly spreading, later confirmed to be a novel coronavirus. After the genetic sequence of the new virus was revealed by scientists on January 10 — before the virus was even known to have hit U.S. shores — Dr. Corbett’s expertise on coronaviruses enabled her to prepare a modified sequence for a vaccine in mere hours. By December, the new COVID-19 vaccine was authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use. The work of Corbett and her team of scientists contributed to the fastest ever development of a new vaccine, and one that was highly effective and easy to manufacture.

Charles Richard Drew (1904 — 1950)
Charles Richard Drew, MD, pioneered blood preservation techniques that led to thousands of lifesaving blood donations. Drew’s doctoral research explored best practices for banking and transfusions, and its insights helped him establish the first large-scale blood banks. Drew led the first American Red Cross Blood Bank and protested the American Red Cross’ policy of segregating blood by race, he ultimately resigned from the organization.

Louis Wade Sullivan (b. 1933)
Louis Wade Sullivan, MD, grew up in the racially segregated rural South in the 1930s. The only Black student in his class at Boston University School of Medicine, he would later serve on the faculty from 1966 to 1975. In 1975, he became the founding Dean of what became the Morehouse School of Medicine — the first predominantly Black medical school opened in the United States in the 20^th century. He is CEO and chair of the Sullivan Alliance, an organization he created in 2005 to increase racial and ethnic minority representation in health care.

Marilyn Hughes Gaston (b. 1939)
After a pivotal experience while working as an intern at Philadelphia General Hospital in 1964, Marilyn committed herself to learning more about Sickle Cell Disease and eventually became a leading researcher on the disease. She became deputy branch chief of the Sickle Cell Disease Branch at the National Institutes of Health, and her groundbreaking 1986 study led to a national Sickle Cell Disease screening program for newborns. In 1990, Gaston became the first Black female physician to be appointed director of the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Bureau of Primary Health Care. She was also the second Black woman to serve as assistant surgeon general as well as achieve the rank of Rear Admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service.

Vivien Theodore Thomas (1910-1985)
A former carpenter, Dr. Vivien Theodore Thomas dropped out of college after losing most of his savings during the Great Depression. He later trained as a surgical assistant, and in 1944 helped devise the "blue baby surgery" with surgeon Dr. Alfred Blalock and pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig at The Johns Hopkins Hospital to correct a congenital heart defect.