02/04/2026
Happy Black History Month!
While highlighting history is important all year round, we would like to take this month to celebrate excellence in the medical field!
Please join us here every Wednesday this month to learn about a small fraction of barrier defying people who have saved countless lives with their ambition, knowledge, bravery, and skills that have paved the way for so many in our field after them!
Today we celebrate Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler!
“I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others” – Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831-1895)
Who is Rebecca Crumpler? Much of her early childhood is shrouded in mystery. What we do know is that in 1831, Rebecca Crumpler the daughter of Absolum Davis and Matilda Webber, in Christiana, Delaware.
As a child, she was sent to Pennsylvania, where she was raised by a beloved and highly skilled aunt. Her aunt was widely respected in her community as a healer and midwife. Inspired by her aunt’s work, Rebecca would go on to become the first African American female medical doctor in the United States.
Not only was she the first Black female physician in the U.S., she is also considered the first Black person to publish a medical book titled A Book of Medical Discourses. In this book, Crumpler outlined best practices for maintaining good health, with a particular focus on the care of women and children. Her main desire in presenting this book was to emphasize the "possibilities of prevention.”
By the age of 21, Rebecca Davis moved to Boston, bringing with her the skills she had learned at her aunt’s knee. She found work as a nurse in Charlestown—then a separate city, now a neighborhood of Boston—and in April of 1852, she married Wyatt Lee, a man who had been formerly enslaved.
At the time, Rebecca—now Rebecca Lee—did not hold a formal nursing degree. This was the 1850s, and although she worked as a nurse, nursing was not credentialed in the way it is today. Formal nursing schools would not exist for another 20 years. Before the advent of modern medicine, most babies were born at home, and midwives and folk healers like Rebecca’s aunt were relied upon for their knowledge, which was passed down from generation to generation.
Rebecca excelled in her work, and the doctors she worked with were so impressed that they encouraged her to apply to medical school, and she did!
When Rebecca Lee began her medical studies in 1859, there were approximately 55,000 doctors in the United States. Of those, only 300 were women—and all of them were white.
In 1864, during the Civil War, Crumpler graduated from the New England Female Medical College, the world’s first medical school for women and the founding institution of what is now the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Her diploma did not declare her a doctor, but rather a “Doctress of Medicine.”
Leaving the relative safety of Boston, she traveled south to Virginia, entering the heart of devastation at the end of the Civil War. What she witnessed there profoundly changed her, shaping her into an early advocate for disease prevention and a pioneer in the field of public health. Her work was imperative, seeing that at the time, only a few white doctors saw black patients. She moved back to Boston where she cared for patients in her local Black community. She treated patients whether or not they had the means to pay. Dr. Crumpler saw that these communities had an increase in illnesses due to precarious living conditions.
The Rebecca Lee Society, one of the first medical societies for African-American women, was named in Crumpler's honor.
More information, including the sources for the material provided here, can be found in the Lost Women of Science podcast.
