After earning a medical degree in 1864, Rebecca Lee Crumpler died in obscurity and was buried without a headstone

Ella Jeffries March 31, 2025

In 1864, newspapers in Boston noted a milestone: The latest students to receive degrees from the New England Female Medical College included a “colored graduate,” one Rebecca Lee Crumpler. It was a brief mention, almost an afterthought, but what it marked was monumental: Crumpler had just become the first Black woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. Yet for decades, her name faded from public memory.

Born in 1831 in Christiana, Delaware, Crumpler was raised by an aunt in Pennsylvania who worked as a nurse and community healer. It was this early exposure to caregiving, she later wrote in A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Parts, that inspired her to pursue a life in medicine. Published in 1883, Crumpler’s book was part medical text, part memoir—an effort to share 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,” Crumpler wrote.

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Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician and medical historian at George Washington University, says Crumpler’s story is part of a lineage of Black healers dating back to the time of slavery. “She and her aunt were following in this tradition of healing,” Gamble explains. “Enslaved women provided essential care as nurses and midwives and herbalists on the plantation.”

Crumpler initially worked as a nurse in Charlestown, Massachusetts, for about eight years. Formal nursing schools didn’t exist yet, so she gained clinical knowledge under the supervision of several white male physicians. Encouraged by these doctors, she applied to medical school.

Crumpler enrolled in 1860. “At the time, the New England Female Medical College had about 21 other women studying to become physicians,” Gamble says. “We don’t know why she decided to become a physician. It might have been because she wanted to make more money, or she wanted a measure of legitimacy, or even to advance her nursing skills.”

Her journey wasn’t linear. After two years, Crumpler paused her studies due to financial difficulties and to care for her ailing husband, Wyatt Lee, who died of tuberculosis in 1863. She returned to school and graduated the following year, but not without resistance. “Originally, [the trustees] did not want to give [Crumpler] her degree,” says Gamble. “They felt she did not have the sufficient skills to become a physician. But they changed their mind.”

On March 1, 1864, the trustees voted to grant 33-year-old Crumpler the title of “doctress of medicine.” According to Gamble, several of the school’s abolitionist patrons likely pushed for her graduation. “She ended up getting her degree because of the color of her skin,” Gamble says. Based on the available sources, the historian adds, it’s impossible to know whether Crumpler lacked the necessary qualifications or if the college simply discounted her skills due to racism and sexism.

In 1860, the U.S. was home to roughly 55,000 physicians—but only 270 were white women, while around 180 were Black men. (Elizabeth Blackwell had become the first woman to receive a medical degree in the U.S. in 1849.) Crumpler stood alone as the first and only Black female physician in the country.

“When people think about Black women in medicine, they think that it didn’t happen until the advent of affirmative action,” Gamble says. “The fact that in 1864 a Black woman got a degree is important for people to know.”

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After briefly practicing in Boston, Crumpler relocated to Richmond, Virginia, in 1865. There, she worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency created by Congress to aid formerly enslaved people in the wake of the Civil War. “She saw this as missionary work,” Gamble says. “She was a deeply religious woman.”

In Richmond, Crumpler provided care to the city’s newly freed Black residents, many of whom lived in dire conditions. According to her book, she had “access each day to a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored.”

While some officials blamed high death rates in free Black communities on supposed racial inferiority or poor hygiene, Crumpler recognized the influence of socioeconomic status on health—a framework that wouldn’t be formally articulated for another century. She attributed high mortality to “lack of shelter, clothing and nutrition,” wrote historian Jim Downs in Sick From Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Crumpler’s writing shows a keen understanding of these challenges. She noted that “thousands of little ones annually die at our very doors, from diseases which could have been prevented, or cut short by timely aid.” Ailments like cholera infantum, which is now understood to be caused by contaminated food and water, were especially deadly to babies. In her book, Crumpler offered detailed advice to prevent such illnesses through proper hygiene and nutrition, as well as breastfeeding.

America’s first Black female doctor also faced open hostility from the white medical establishment. As physician Melody T. McCloud told Scientific Americanin 2023, Crumpler was denied admitting privileges to hospitals and often had her prescriptions refused by pharmacists. Yet Crumpler continued her work.

“It’s unclear how long she practiced medicine,” Gamble says. “She might have continued practicing for a while after returning to Boston, but she also taught school. We don’t know how long she was actively seeing patients.”

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By the late 1860s, Crumpler had moved back to Boston with her second husband, Arthur Crumpler, who had escaped from slavery in Virginia during the Civil War. The couple settled on Joy Street in Beacon Hill, then home to a thriving Black community. Crumpler treated women and children in her own home, regardless of their ability to pay.

In 1870, Crumpler gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Lizzie Sinclair Crumpler who likely didn’t survive into adulthood. Around this same time, she began teaching while also continuing her studies. In 1875, Gamble says, she enrolled as a special student in mathematics at the West Newton English and Classical School.

By 1880, the family had moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where they built a modest home with a garden. There, Crumpler finally turned her journal notes into a book. In 1883, she published A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Parts, believed to be the first medical text by an African American author.

The book focused on maternal and child health and was dedicated to “mothers, nurses and all who may desire to mitigate the afflictions of the human race.” In its pages, Crumpler offered practical advice on breastfeeding, teething and preventing deadly diseases like cholera infantum. She also addressed inequality in medical care, writing, “It is just as important that a doctor should be in attendance before the birth of a poor woman’s child as that he should be present before the birth of the child of wealth.”

In the book’s introduction, Crumpler promised to use “as few technical terms as possible,” signaling her desire to make medical knowledge accessible to everyday women and families.

Her writing also challenged moral double standards. For example, she criticized the wealthy for outsourcing breastfeeding, noting that it often harmed the wet nurses’ own infants. “Her babe may thrive and live,” she wrote, “while that of her wet nurse may soon pine away and die.”

Crumpler took a firm stance against the use of alcohol and opium-based medicines in child rearing. “No paregoric, laudanum or other preparations containing opium should ever be given to an infant for the purpose of quieting or making it sleep,” she advised. As for menstrual cramps, she rejected brandy and gin, favoring warm compresses instead.

Crumpler also advocated for economic planning. She suggested that an extra ten cents a day be set aside as a guarantee for a baby’s comfort during their first six months—a proposal combining practical wisdom with an eye toward social uplift.

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Crumpler died of fibroid tumors in 1895, at age 64. She was buried in an unmarked grave at Fairview Cemetery in Boston. Arthur, who died in 1910, was buried beside her. They had no surviving descendants, and for more than a century, no gravestones marked their resting place.

In the decades after her death, Crumpler was almost forgotten. No other Black women graduated from her alma mater, the New England Female Medical College, before the school merged with Boston University in 1873. And for many years, historians incorrectly credited Rebecca Cole, who graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1867, as the first Black woman physician.

“She was really lost to history,” says Gamble. “It wasn’t until 1948 or 1949 that she was actually recognized as the first Black woman to receive a medical degree.”

Additional acknowledgement followed in the 1980s, when the eponymous Rebecca Lee Society, a group formed to support Black female physicians, helped reintroduce her story to the public. According to a New York Timesobituary published in 2021, members of the group would walk the grounds of Fairview Cemetery, searching for evidence of her burial site. Using city and cemetery records, the group was able to identify Crumpler’s unmarked grave. After a successful fundraising campaign led by the Friends of the Hyde Park Branch Library, gravestones were finally installed for Crumpler and Arthur in 2020, 125 years after her death.

Today, Crumpler’s contributions are commemorated across Boston. Her Joy Street home is part of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, and the City of Boston proclaimed February 8, 2021, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler Day. Her name is even affixed to medical scholarships. A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Partsremains in print, and some readers have compared it to modern maternal health guides like What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

But Crumpler’s most enduring legacy is perhaps in the example she set.

“As a physician myself, I’m following in her footsteps,” Gamble says.

Through the rediscovery of her life and work, Crumpler is finally being remembered not just as a historical first, but as a committed healer whose mission and message still resonate. Her story, long buried, is now reclaiming its rightful place in American medical history.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-nations-first-black-female-doctor-blazed-a-path-for-women-in-medicine-but-she-was-left-out-of-the-story-for-decades-180986328/