THE TRAILBLAZING BLACK FEMALE DOCTOR THAT AMERICAN HISTORY FORGOT

By Sean Braswell via https://www.ozy.com

Because one of the pioneering physicians and medical writers of the 19th century was a Black woman named Rebecca Crumpler.

It’s somewhat hard today to appreciate just what an accomplishment the 145-page treatise A Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts represents. Even the title of the 1883 work is misleadingly modest. One of the first American medical guides to offer advice for women and children, the book deals with treating everything from infant bowel complaints to hemorrhoids and diphtheria. It even offers marital advice: one way to stay happily married “is to continue in the careful routine of the courting days, till it becomes well understood between the two.”

Dedicated “to mothers, nurses, and all who may desire to mitigate the afflictions of the human race,” Medical Discourses is the masterwork of Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman in America to earn a medical degree. She managed to blaze a path through the …

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