Rebecca Lee Crumpler's medical degree

No photograph of Rebecca Lee Crumpler survives, and most of what is known about her comes from the introduction to a book she published in 1883. She was born Rebecca Davis in Delaware in 1831 and raised by an aunt in Pennsylvania whose help was constantly sought by sick neighbors. From 1852 to 1860 she worked as a nurse under several doctors, mostly in Charlestown, Massachusetts, without formal training. Those doctors wrote letters commending her to the New England Female Medical College, which admitted her in 1860.

The college's founder, Samuel Gregory, had first trained women only as midwives, believing it improper for male doctors to attend childbirth; by Crumpler's time the course covered much more. Most medical schools then barred Black students. She graduated in 1864 with the degree of Doctress of Medicine, the first African American woman in the United States to earn an MD, a distinction once credited to Rebecca Cole. She was the only African American woman to graduate from the college, which merged with Boston University School of Medicine in 1873.

After a short time in practice in Boston, she moved to Richmond, Virginia, when the Civil War ended in 1865, seeing it as a field for missionary work and a chance to learn the diseases of women and children. She worked with the Freedmen's Bureau and missionary groups, treating freed people who otherwise had no medical care. In the last quarter of 1866, she wrote, she saw large numbers of the poor each day in a Black population of more than 30,000.

Back in Boston she practiced from her home on Joy Street on Beacon Hill, then a mostly Black neighborhood, and took children into the house for treatment, often regardless of payment. By 1880 she had moved to Hyde Park and was no longer in active practice. Her Book of Medical Discourses, drawn from notes kept during her years of practice, dealt with bowel complaints in infants and young children and with the illnesses of women.

Crumpler married twice and had one child. She died in Boston in 1895 and is buried in Fairview Cemetery.