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Before she was a legend and icon, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was paving the way for generations of Black women in medicine as the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S.
Born Rebecca Davis in Delaware in 1831, Crumpler was raised by an auntie in Pennsylvania who helped care for sick neighbors. Those early experiences inspired her to relieve the suffering of others and eventually move to Massachusetts where she thrived as a nurse.
While there, Crumpler earned her spot at the New England Female Medical College (NEFMC)–the first school in the country to train women M.D.s–in 1860.
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At the time, many men argued that women were not emotionally equipped to be doctors while most medical schools barred Black students regardless of gender.
The NEFMC initially trained women to work only as midwives before explanding the curriculum to encompass a more complete medical education.
Defying blatant racism and sexism, Dr. Crumpler graduated with a “Doctress of Medicine” medical degree from New England Female Medical College in 1864, becoming the first Black woman doctor in the country.
“Originally, [the trustees] did not want to give [Crumpler] her degree,” said Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician and medical historian at George Washington University.
“They felt she did not have the sufficient skills to become a physician. But they changed their mind.”
She started practicing in Boston before making her way to Richmond, Virginia, which appealed to her as the ideal field for real missionary work at the end of the Civil War.
During her time in Richmond, she collaborated with the Freedmen’s Bureau and other missionary and charity groups to care for newly freed Black people, many of whom faced discrimination from white doctors and would otherwise be denied access to medical care.
Dr. Crumpler continued to practice after returning to Boston, where she treated patients, regardless of whether they could pay or not, around her home on Joy Street in Beacon Hill–a predominately Black neighborhood in the late 1860s.
Later, she and her second husband moved to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. In 1883, she published A Book of Medical Discourses with advice on treating illnesses in infants, young children, and women of childbearing age.
Part medical text, part memoir, the classic work shared both clinical advice and her experience as a Black woman physician.
“Having been reared by a kind aunt in Pennsylvania, whose usefulness with the sick was continually sought, I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to be in a position to relieve the sufferings of others,” wrote Crumpler, per Smithsonian Magazine.
Dr. Crumpler married twice and had one child, Lizzie Sinclair Crumpler, before passing away in 1895 at age 64 in Boston. She was buried in an unmarked grave at Fairview Cemetery in Boston.
In the years to come, Crumpler was almost forgotten despite being the only Black woman to graduate from her alma mater, the New England Female Medical College, before the school merged with Boston University in 1873.
For decades, historians incorrectly credited Rebecca Cole, who graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1867, as the first Black woman physician until around 1949 where she finally received her long-overdue distinction as the first Black woman to receive a medical degree.
Additional acknowledgement followed in the 1980s, when the Rebecca Lee Society–a group formed to support Black female physicians–reintroduced her story to the public.
Now, 162 years after her historic feat, her indelible legacy lives on through brilliant Black women in medicine who gather every year for National Women Physicians Day (Feb. 8) where they celebrate generations of trailblazing Black women physicians on Dr. Crumpler’s birthday.
