Black and female, Rebecca Lee Crumpler faced deep-seated prejudice, hate, and obstruction. In 1864, she became the first African American female medical doctor in the U.S. She cared for the sick and injured for more than three decades and she wrote and published a book of medical advice for women and children in 1883. This makes her the first known Black person to publish a medical book.
Early Life
We know very little about Dr. Crumpler’s early life. According to some records, she was born on February 8, 1831, in Delaware. Her parents were Absolum Davis and Matilda Webber.
During her childhood, her parents sent her to live with an aunt in Pennsylvania. She wrote a summary in her book, “It may be well to state here that, 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 relieve the sufferings of others.” The conclusion historians made from this is that her aunt was a healer for their community.
Marriage & Early Career
Rebecca moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1852. In April of that year, she married Wyatt Lee, a former slave.
She worked as a nurse in Charlestown (no longer a separate city but a Boston neighborhood) for the next eight years. She had no formal training, just what she’d learned from her aunt. That’s because the first formal school for nursing opened twenty years later, in 1873.
The male doctors she worked with were impressed enough by her nursing skills they recommended her for medical school (to become a doctor). Abolitionists, both black and white, helped finance her schooling.
In 1859, there were about 55,000 doctors in the United States. Only 300 of those were women. All of them were white.
Dr. Samuel Gregor founded the New England Female Medical College (now the Boston University School of Medicine) in 1848. He intended for it to teach women to care for women and babies because he believed male doctors doing maternity care offended female decency. By 1859, they had expanded the curriculum to include more general medical knowledge.
Education & Complications
They admitted Rebecca to the New England Female Medical College in 1859 or 1860.
The Civil War began in April 1861.
She was more than halfway through school when her husband became bedridden with consumption. In the mid-1800s, “consumption” (later named Tuberculosis) killed more people in Boston than any other disease. It is highly contagious and the crowded living conditions and lack of understanding of the need for good hygiene, proper food storage, and sewage containment meant many of those deaths were in Rebecca’s neighborhood.
She left school to care for Wyatt. He died of tuberculosis in 1863 one day before their 11th wedding anniversary.
After his death, Rebecca returned to school full of focus and determination. She graduated one year later. According to her 1864 diploma from the New England Female Medical College, she was not a doctor, but a “Doctress of Medicine.” And she began her medical practice in Boston.
A New Relationship
While Rebecca cared for her dying husband and the Civil War raged, Arthur Crumpler escaped from a plantation in Virginia where he’d been a slave. He joined a Union Army base. The Army considered him “contraband,” probably did not treat him well.
He could not read or write, but he was a skilled blacksmith, so he worked for the Army for a while. The Army promised they’d pay him a sum of money for his work when he left the army. But when he left, they gave him a paper to sign. Unable to read, he put his X on the paper. He got less money than they had promised him, which convinced him he needed to learn to read and write.
He knew Boston was a refuge for escaped slaves, so that’s where he went. There he worked as a blacksmith. He registered to vote and signed up for the draft.
Second Marriage
We don’t know how Rebecca met Arthur. Historians figure they met in church. They married in the spring of 1865 and her surname changed to Crumpler.
The spring of 1865 also brought the end of the U.S. Civil war. It’s estimated that 750,000 soldiers died in the war and tens of thousands of civilians were casualties. There are no estimates of the numbers of the injured.
The Freedmen’s Bureau
An act of Congress created The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Record Group 105), also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, in the War Department on March 3, 1865. It was to supervise and manage all matters relating to the refugees and freedmen and lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War, duties previously shared by military commanders and US Treasury Department officials.
The Bureau needed medical personnel. Rebecca answered their call. She went to Richmond, Virginia and considered it a “proper field for real missionary work.” Records are inconsistent about whether her husband, Arthur, went to Richmond with her. Some report he would not return to the area where he had been a slave.
Doctoring The Newly Freed
The damage in and around Richmond was enormous. Many places were burnt to the ground. Her patients were people white doctors wouldn’t touch. They were very poor and needed help with everything. Corpses tainted drinking water. Sewers were open. Freed women and children were destitute, living off scraps they could find in the ashes or beg off of Union Army soldiers.
Survivors lived in crowded encampments where outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid fever, and smallpox were unchecked. No one kept an accurate record of how many recently freed slaves died in the war’s aftermath.
Pharmacists refused to honor prescriptions Rebecca wrote for her patients. White hospitals refused to admit her patients when they needed care. “Some people said that the MD behind her name stands not for medical doctor, but for mule driver.”
The Freedmen’s Bureau hospitals under stood that basic hygiene, clean hospitals, clean blankets, keeping food fresh, clean clothing could help reduce the spread of disease but it was labor intensive. So Rebecca offered women and children a sort of haven by getting them jobs as laundresses, washerwomen, cooks, and so on.
After two or three years, Rebecca returned home to Boston. Rebecca took notes on what she saw during her time in Richmond. What she had seen and endured in the war devastation around Richmond changed her. She became an early advocate for disease prevention and a pioneer in public health.
The Next Stage of Life
Tuberculosis still had its deadly hands strangling rich and poor families in Boston. Rebecca saw the death reports as an echo of what had happened with the Civil War refugees she had cared for. “I do not fail to notice the various published records of the condition of the health of Boston and vicinity.” In 1870, the gravity of the situation grew more urgent. Rebecca was pregnant.
She and her husband, Arthur, bought land about ten miles from the city out in the countryside. But their house still needed to be built. They moved a few blocks west.
In December 1870, she gave birth to a daughter, Lizzie Sinclair Crumpler. There is not a trace of Lizzie in the public record after her birth, not even in the census data or her parents’ public records. Historians assume their daughter did not survive to her fifth birthday. (At that time, one in five newborns died in their first five years.)
Rebecca and Arthur spent several years saving. Arthur worked as a porter, and she saw patients at their Beacon Hill home. As always, she kept notes of her observations. By 1878, they could afford to add to their plot of land in the countryside. And they did. This plot extended their property to the edge of a brook.
Published
By 1880, they lived in a modest home on their land and raised a medicinal garden. Rebecca finally had time to assemble her notes into a book. Her 145 page book, A Book of Medical Discourses, published in 1883, focuses on women’s and children’s health. She wrote that “my chief desire in presenting this book is to impress upon somebody’s mind the possibility of prevention.” She used as few medical terms as possible. It’s full of practical tips for women and children ranging from avoiding using alcohol to treat menstrual cramps to recommending mothers save ten cents a day to help provide for a baby during the first six months, to reassuring mothers that crying develops and keeps children’s lungs clear. Some consider it an early Doctor Spock or What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
Later Life
Rebecca continued to practice medicine in her home and tending her garden for the rest of her life. She and Arthur read the daily newspapers and Bible passages to each other. She helped found the Women’s Progressive Industrial Union and spoke about women’s rights and temperance.
Then, in 1895, Rebecca died one month from her 64th birthday. It’s reported that she died of complications of fibroid tumors. The same condition that happens to Black women disproportionately even today.
Arthur buried Rebecca across the brook from their house in Fairview Cemetery. Arthur followed fifteen years later. Side-by-side, their graves were unmarked.
Legacy
It’s likely Dr. Crumpler did not know she was the first black woman to become a doctor. Likewise, she probably didn’t know her book was the first. She certainly didn’t know it was a pre-cursor to
Virginia’s governor declared March 30, 2019 “Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler Day.” Her Beacon Hill home is now a stop on the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. And the Rebecca Lee Society, named for Dr. Crumpler, is one of the first medical communities for African American women.
A fundraiser in 2019, raised the funds to pay for headstones for Rebecca and Arthur. They installed the headstones in 2020.
No photographs of Dr. Crumpler survived. This may or may not have been intentional. During her lifetime, professionals who knew how to use a combination of toxic chemicals to develop the images did photography. In the mid-to-late 1800s, people hadn’t perfected photograph preservation.
Interestingly, when you order a reprint of Rebecca’s book or look her up online, there are photographs of black women attached. Online, it’s often Mary Eliza Mahoney, the first Black female nurse licensed in the US. Or Dr. Eliza Ann Grier, the first Black female physician in the state of Georgia. And her book has a photograph of American missionary and doctor, Georgia E. L. Patton Washington.
Having no photographs of Rebecca Lee Crumpler, M.D., doesn’t mean we shouldn’t honor her memory. We must remember Doctor Crumpler. She was a strong woman who did remarkable things all in a day’s work.
Today, only about 2% of practicing physicians identify as African American women. My guess is that many, if not all of them, have to be as strong as Dr. Crumpler. My prayer is that someday we’ll have more equity here in the U.S.
Had you heard of Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler before?
Learn the stories of other Black women in history, stories we all need to know:
Mary McLeod Bethune Lights the Way Even After Death
Hattie Canty, The Maid Who Fought Back
Marie Van Brittan Brown Are You Alarmed?
Bessie Coleman, A High Flying Hero Who Made Yes Happen
Dorothy Cotton, Nonviolent, She Made a Difference
Alberta Odell Jones, The Unsolved Murder of Alberta Odell Jones
Mary Mahoney, The first African-American Professional Nurse
Strong Black Women Past and Present
References
U.S. National Library of Medicine
Image Credits
Featured is an illustration purchased from DepositPhotos.com
Photo of Arthur Crumpler is Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo of her book is Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Lynette, profound thanks for this post and information. As a former registered nurse who later majored in American history, with a special interest in the Civil War era and the history of medicine, I was entranced and delighted by this narrative. Now to investigate your reference list (at the expense of my day job…)!
That’s really gratifying, Anna. I’m not certain if you know, I am also a former nurse. I haven’t studied the Civil War deeply, but have always found it a deeply fascinating. Each of my sources have their resources listed, so have fun exploring!