Rebecca Lee Crumpler

Rebecca Davis was raised in Pennsylvania by an aunt who spent her days caring for sick neighbors, and the girl who watched her do it decided early what she wanted to be. She spent eight years, from 1855 to 1864, working as a nurse in Massachusetts before any medical school would consider her, since nursing then required no license and doctors simply vouched for character. In 1860 she was admitted to the New England Female Medical College, the only Black woman in her class, and paid her way through three years of coursework on scholarships built for exactly that purpose. Her first husband, Wyatt Lee, died of tuberculosis in April 1863, a year before she finished, and she crossed the stage a widow.

She graduated on March 1, 1864, the first Black woman in the United States to hold a medical degree, and opened a Boston practice treating poor women and children. She married Arthur Crumpler, a man born into slavery, in May 1865, then the couple went south to Richmond, Virginia, where she worked for the Freedmen's Bureau among a formerly enslaved population Bureau records put above thirty thousand. White pharmacists in Richmond refused to fill her prescriptions. Male physicians ignored her diagnoses outright, and hospital staff mocked her degree, joking that "M.D." must stand for "mule driver." Around 1870 she returned to Boston and kept a practice on Joy Street in Beacon Hill for two more decades, publishing a medical guide for mothers and nurses in 1883 that mixed practical pediatric advice with her own moral instruction.

The prescriptions white pharmacists refused to fill were not an isolated insult; they were how a segregated profession made her credential functionally useless whenever it left her own office. Crumpler had no institution behind her once the New England Female Medical College closed its doors in 1873, its charter absorbed into Boston University's new coeducational, still overwhelmingly white medical school. She built her authority instead on paper, in "A Book of Medical Discourses," dedicating it to nurses and the mothers she had spent thirty years treating rather than to the colleagues who had spent the same thirty years refusing to treat her as one of them. She and Arthur had one daughter, Lizzie, born in December 1870, who appears to have died in infancy. Crumpler died on March 9, 1895, of fibroid tumors, at sixty-four, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts.

She and Arthur went into Fairview Cemetery in unmarked graves, and stayed there for a hundred and twenty-five years. Not until July 2020 did the Friends of the Hyde Park Library raise the money for headstones. By then Boston and Virginia had both moved to claim her: Virginia's governor named March 30 Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler Day in 2019, and Boston marked her birthday the following year. The Rebecca Lee Society, an early professional association for Black women physicians, had already carried her name for decades. Her own book, once dismissed as a curiosity, is now read as one of the only surviving clinical records written by a nineteenth-century Black physician in her own words.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler's life against the full span of the corpus.

• New England Female Medical College degree other
  First Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States 1864
• Freedmen's Bureau practice, Richmond, Virginia other
  Provided care to a formerly enslaved population Bureau records put above 30,000 1865
• Private practice, 67 Joy Street, Boston other
  Treated poor women and children for two more decades 1870
• A Book of Medical Discourses book
  One of the earliest medical texts published by an African American author 1883

• February 8, 1831 aged 0 Born in Christiana, Delaware
• April 19, 1852 aged 21 Marries Wyatt Lee
• 1855 aged ~24 Begins eight years working as a nurse in Massachusetts
• 1860 aged ~29 Admitted to the New England Female Medical College
• March 1, 1864 aged 33 Graduates, becoming the first Black woman to earn a US medical degree
• May 1865 aged 34 Marries Arthur Crumpler; the couple moves to Richmond, Virginia
• December 1870 aged 39 Daughter Lizzie is born
• 1883 aged ~52 Publishes A Book of Medical Discourses
• March 9, 1895 aged 64 Dies in Hyde Park, Massachusetts

• Elizabeth Blackwell 1821–1910
  First woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and a pioneer of women’s medical education. preceded her into American medicine
• Clara Barton 1821–1912
  Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross and pioneered disaster relief in America. contemporary in Civil War-era caregiving
• Harriet Tubman 1822–1913
  Abolitionist who escaped slavery and led hundreds to freedom via the Underground Railroad. aided the same freed communities