Aggarwal NK. The Legacy of James McCune Smith, MD—The First US Black Physician. JAMA. Published online November 29, 2021.

Introduction

Consensus is emerging that the medical community must recognize its complicity in racism. Such work requires atoning for the exclusion of Black individuals from US medical schools, residency programs, and professional societies. For example, Flexner’s 1910 report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recommended closing all but 2 historically Black medical colleges, despite acknowledging that 2 colleges could not train enough physicians to serve 9.8 million Black people in the US.¹ Organized medicine can foster inclusion by condemning its histories of discrimination and celebrating underrepresented physicians who transcended societal barriers.²

This article commemorates Dr James McCune Smith, the first Black person from the US to earn a medical degree, who has been called the foremost Black intellectual in the 19th-century US. He was fluent in French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and Spanish and the author of more than 100 articles in ethnology, geography, and medicine.³ His abolitionist works have intrigued scholars in African American studies, literature, and history, and his writings inspired a 2018 prize-winning short story collection. However, his medical writings have not received much attention apart from being noted in secondary scholarship.^3–5 Smith pioneered early research on the relationship between social disadvantage and health outcomes. This article, after a brief life survey, will focus on 2 of Smith’s areas of interest—opioid use in women and longevity rates of Black individuals—as examples of his clinical science and public health scholarship.