13 Black American Pioneers Who Changed Healthcare

A significant number of pioneering Black men and women have helped change the course of healthcare and race relations in the United States since at least the early 19th century. They invented first-of-their-kind medical devices, developed innovative surgical procedures, paved the way for improved patient access to quality care, and raised awareness about quality-of-life issues.

Their legacies live on in hospitals and clinics, doctors’ offices, schools, universities, and research laboratories.

Born into slavery in New York City in 1813, James McCune Smith set his sights on becoming a doctor when he was a young man. He was denied admission to American colleges because he was Black, but he was able to attend the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and medical degrees by age 24.

Dr. Smith had a keen interest in languages, mastering Latin, Greek, and French, and developed a working knowledge of Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and German. When he returned to New York City in 1837, he established his own medical office and pharmacy at 93 West Broadway, making him the first African American doctor with his own practice in the United States. As a physician, he treated both Black and white patients, and also served as the chief doctor at the New York City Colored Orphan Asylum.

Smith devoted much of his life to working with abolitionists to end the enslavement of Black people in the South. He died about three weeks before the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery.

When Rebecca Lee Crumpler graduated from the New England Female Medical College in 1864, she became the first Black female physician in the United States. That same year, she began practicing medicine in Boston, but moved to Richmond, Virginia, following the end of the Civil War to help care for freed African Americans. In the late 1860s, she returned to Boston and resumed her practice.

Before she attended college, Dr. Crumpler had worked as a nurse. She wrote in her Book of Medical Discourses, published in 1883, that she “sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others.” The book was one of the first publications about medicine written by an African American.

After apprenticing with a surgeon, Daniel Hale Williams earned a medical degree and started working as a surgeon in Chicago in 1884. Because of discrimination, hospitals at that time barred Black doctors from working on staff. So Dr. Williams opened the nation’s first Black-owned interracial hospital.

Provident Hospital offered training to African American interns and established America’s first school for Black nurses. On July 10, 1893, Williams successfully repaired the pericardium (the sac surrounding the heart) of a man who had been stabbed in a knife fight. The operation is considered to be the first documented successful open-heart surgery on a human, and Williams is regarded as the first African American cardiologist.

He went on to cofound the National Medical Association, and became the first Black physician admitted to the American College of Surgeons.

Solomon Carter Fuller’s grandparents were medical missionaries in Liberia, and he grew up with a strong interest in medicine. After earning his medical degree in 1897 from Boston University, he became the first African American psychiatrist.

In 1904, he began pioneering work with the psychiatrist and neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer in Germany, studying the traits of dementia. Dr. Fuller was the first to translate much of Alzheimer’s work into English, including research regarding Auguste Deter, the person with the first reported case of the disease.

When he returned to the United States, Fuller continued research on Alzheimer’s disease as well as schizophrenia, depression, and other mental illness. In 1912, he published the first comprehensive review of Alzheimer’s cases.

While attending medical school at McGill University in Montreal, Charles Drew, a native of Washington, DC, developed an interest in blood transfusions and the properties of blood. As a surgeon, he came up with innovative ways to store blood plasma in blood banks. Plasma can be preserved or “banked” much longer than whole blood. Drew discovered that the plasma could be dried and reconstituted later.

His work as the director of the first blood bank project in Britain during World War II helped save thousands of lives as he oversaw the successful collection of 14,500 pints of vital plasma for the British. He also established the American Red Cross blood bank and served as its director starting in 1941, earning the nickname “father of the blood bank” after creating the first “bloodmobile,” a mobile blood donation truck with a refrigerator. He quit, however, when the Red Cross insisted on segregating African American blood.

From 1942 to 1945, Dr. Drew served as a surgeon and professor of medicine at Freemen’s Hospital and Howard University in Washington, DC. He died at age 46 in a car accident.

The daughter of one of the first African American graduates of Harvard Medical School, Jane Cooke Wright, MD, grew up with a keen interest in healthcare. Her father, Dr. Louis Wright, was also the first Black doctor appointed to a staff position at a municipal hospital in New York City, and in 1929, the city hired him as police surgeon — the first African American to hold that position.

After earning her medical degree, Dr. Wright worked alongside her father at the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Center, which her father established in 1948. Together, father and daughter researched chemotherapy drugs that led to remissions in patients with leukemia and lymphoma.

In 1952, when her father died of tuberculosis, Wright became the head of the Cancer Research Center at age 33. She created an innovative technique to test the effect of drugs on cancer cells by using patient tissue rather than laboratory mice. She later became director of cancer chemotherapy research at New York University Medical Center, and was also an associate dean at New York Medical College.

The New York Cancer Society elected Wright as its first woman president in 1971. Her research helped transform chemotherapy from a last resort to a viable treatment for cancer.

Born in Dallas, Otis Boykin went to work in Chicago after undergraduate school and then started graduate studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, but had to drop out because he couldn’t cover tuition. That didn’t hinder him, though, and he instead started working on his own inventions; throughout his career, he ultimately patented 28 electronic devices.

Boykin developed resistors for electronic components that made the production of televisions and computers much more affordable. But he became best known for improving the pacemaker, which uses electrical impulses to help people maintain a regular heartbeat: He came up with a control unit that regulated the pacemaker with more precision. Boykin died of heart failure in 1982.

As tuberculosis was ravaging New York City in the early 1900s, patients could not stay in regular hospitals. The Sea View hospital in Staten Island, a tuberculosis facility that opened in 1913, ended up caring for thousands of patients who were unable to afford care at more expensive sanitariums. When its wards filled to overflowing in 1929, white nurses caring for the very ill patients began to leave in droves.

To fill the many vacancies created by their exodus, the city recruited hundreds of Black nurses from the Jim Crow South, enticing them with promises of an education, career, and living wage, as Maria Smilios details in her new book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis. But despite their bravery and tenacity in working in grueling and unsafe conditions — many of them got sick or died — they were underpaid and discriminated against, both in their neighborhoods and at Sea View. Tables in Sea View's cafeteria were marked “for whites only” even though the hospital was one of just four municipal hospitals in New York that otherwise didn’t discriminate against Black nurses.

Throughout their decades of work at Sea View, the Black Angels contributed to the development of isoniazid, an antibiotic to treat tuberculosis, by administering the drug to patients and collecting massive amounts of data on how it affected them. In 1951, this data was part of a breakthrough trial showing the effectiveness of isoniazid in treating the disease.

Ten years later, Sea View closed because of lack of patients, and ultimately, the Black Angels helped to save tens of millions of lives.

When Lonnie Bristow, MD, was young and growing up in Harlem, he often used to meet his mom at Sydenham Hospital, where she was a nurse, for the walk home. His exposure to doctors of all races in the emergency room sparked his interest in medicine, leading him to pursue a bachelor of science degree first at Morehouse College in Atlanta and then at the City College of New York, and a medical degree from the New York University College of Medicine in 1957.

After completing part of his residency at a hospital in San Francisco, Dr. Bristow started practicing in the Bay Area in the early 1960s, focusing on internal medicine with a subspecialty in occupational medicine. An advocate for diversity in medicine and affordable healthcare for all, Bristow was selected as the first Black member of the American Medical Association's (AMA) board of trustees in 1985, ultimately becoming the first Black president for the 1995–1996 term. The organization had only started allowing membership to Black doctors in 1968.

During his time as president, he worked to advance many of the same goals he had throughout his career, including expanding the range of care doctors give patients, improving the doctor-patient relationship, and putting patients’ needs ahead of monetary interests, according to Blackpost. He also focused on sickle cell anemia, which affects Black Americans at a higher rate than any other group in the United States, as well as coronary care and socioeconomic issues impacting healthcare.

He saw his election to president of the AMA as an advancement for Black Americans in the medical field and spoke frequently to future medical professionals of various backgrounds, encouraging them to strive for excellence in order to realize their dreams. His advocacy efforts continued following his tenure: As he wrote in his article “Diversity and the Road to the ‘Land of Best Care’” in 2003 in the AMA Journal of Ethics, “Every American should have access to culturally competent care if that care is to be truly patient-centered.”

Minnie Jones, the eldest of eight children, grew up in a rural, segregated, poverty-stricken region of Arkansas. Her parents were sharecroppers, and she worked in cotton fields starting at age 5. She often had to miss months of school in the fall when it was harvest time, but she still excelled at academics, earning a scholarship to attend the all-Black liberal arts Philander Smith College in Little Rock, where she changed her name to Jocelyn.

When she heard a speech by Edith Irby Jones, the first African American to be accepted as a nonsegregated student at the University of Arkansas Medical School, she was inspired to become a doctor. After three years of service in the U.S. Army, she attended the University of Arkansas medical school on the GI Bill. While in school, she met her husband, high school basketball coach Oliver Elders. After earning her medical degree, Dr. Elders went on to become the first board-certified pediatric endocrinologist in the state of Arkansas in 1978.

From 1987 to 1992, Elders served as the head of the Arkansas Department of Health under then governor Bill Clinton. When Clinton became president in 1993, he appointed Elders as Surgeon General, the first Black American and second woman to hold that post. She became a controversial leader because of her willingness to frankly discuss issues such as drug legalization, in-school distribution of contraception, and healthy human sexuality. In the midst of this controversy, Elders was asked by the administration to resign in 1994.

Patricia Bath, MD, was the first African American to complete an ophthalmology residency with New York University’s School of Medicine, in 1973. Two years later, the UCLA School of Medicine appointed her as the first female faculty member in its department of ophthalmology. Believing that “eyesight is a basic human right,” Dr. Bath went on to cofound the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in 1976.

In the early 1980s, Bath studied laser technology and saw its potential for eye surgery. In 1981, she conceived of her invention the laserphaco probe, a device and method for cataract treatments. When she patented the technique, in 1988, she became the first African American female doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention.

Mae Jemison, MD, is most famous for becoming the first Black woman astronaut to go into space, in 1992. Jemison, however, is also a trained physician who has dedicated her life to improving global health.

Dr. Jemison joined the Peace Corps in 1983, working as a medical officer for two years in Africa. Her work in the Peace Corps taught her about healthcare in developing countries. Later, as an astronaut, she learned about satellite telecommunications. She combined those two skill sets to form the Jemison Group, which develops telecommunications systems to improve healthcare delivery in developing countries.

Jemison says she takes inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. in focusing on what she sees as unacceptable disparities in the quality of healthcare in the United States and developing nations. “We talk about taking proper care of people, but we don’t do it,” she said at a dinner honoring MLK in 2006. “We lack the commitment. Martin Luther King was about doing things. He didn’t just have a dream, he got things done.”

In early January 2020, the virus quickly spreading through China that had been making headlines since December was confirmed to be a novel coronavirus — a new strain in the same family of viruses that Kizzmekia Corbett, PhD, had been studying for five years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As a senior research fellow and the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines and Immunopathogenesis Team in the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the North Carolina native was in the perfect position to quickly respond.

After the genetic sequence of the new virus was revealed by scientists on January 10 — before the virus was even known to have hit U.S. shores — Dr. Corbett’s expertise on coronaviruses enabled her to prepare a modified sequence for a vaccine in mere hours, according to an article in The New York Times. By January 14, the NIH had already shared her sequence with the vaccine developer Moderna, which started running its first human trials of the vaccine in March. By December, the new COVID-19 vaccine was authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use.

The work of Corbett and her team of scientists contributed to the fastest ever development of a new vaccine, and one that was highly effective and easy to manufacture. The biopharmaceutical company Pfizer developed a COVID-19 vaccine using the same synthetic messenger RNA to fight the virus as the Moderna vaccine, and together the two vaccines have been administered to billions of people around the world, according to the World Health Organization.

Following her success in developing the vaccine, Corbett was asked by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to head up her own lab in the department of immunology and infectious diseases. She also became an assistant professor in the department in June 2021, continuing her work as a viral immunologist with plans to focus on research for future pandemic preparedness and the development of universal vaccines.

“I want to do what we did with coronaviruses — create a solid body of knowledge for other viruses so that the world has information at hand to quickly and safely develop vaccines,” she told Harvard Public Health. “That concept is called ‘pandemic preparedness,’ and that’s really what my lab here will be focusing on.”