On March 1, 1864 — while the Civil War still raged — Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. She then wrote the first medical book published by an African American author. And when she died, she was buried in an unmarked grave, where she lay for 125 years, while history handed her “first” to somebody else.
Crumpler was born on February 8, 1831, and raised in Pennsylvania by an aunt who was a community healer and nurse — a woman neighbors called on when somebody was sick. The calling, you could say, was inherited. Crumpler worked as a nurse in Massachusetts, then entered the New England Female Medical College — the only Black woman ever to attend it. On March 1, 1864, she graduated with her medical degree, the first Black woman in American history to hold one.
After the Civil War, she took her degree where the need was desperate: Richmond, Virginia, where she cared for thousands of newly freed people through the Freedmen’s Bureau — men, women and children stepping out of slavery with nothing, met by a doctor who had decided her skills belonged to them.
The book, and the erasure
In 1883 she published A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Parts — a 145-page guide on the health of women and children, believed to be the first medical book published by an African American author, dedicated “to mothers, nurses and all who may desire to mitigate the afflictions of the human race.” Think of who that book was for: not the medical establishment that had barely let her in, but mothers and nurses — the people actually holding the sick children at 2 a.m.
Then came the erasure. Crumpler died in 1895 and was buried in an unmarked grave. For decades, history wrongly credited Rebecca Cole — who earned her degree in 1867 — as the first Black woman doctor in America. Crumpler’s first stood in the record books under another woman’s name, and her bones lay under no name at all, until 2020, when a headstone was finally installed over her grave — 125 years later.
One hundred and twenty-five years. A degree in wartime, thousands of freedpeople treated, a book that taught mothers how to keep their children alive — and the country needed until 2020 to put her name in stone. This page puts it in the headline, where it always belonged: Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, first, 1864.
Join the conversation
First Black woman doctor in America, 1864 — and her grave went unmarked until 2020. Were you taught Rebecca Cole’s name instead, the way history books printed it for decades? And who else do you think is lying in an unmarked grave with a “first” to her name? Tell us below.
Source note: Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler’s account — born February 8, 1831 and raised in Pennsylvania by an aunt who was a community healer and nurse; working as a nurse in Massachusetts and entering the New England Female Medical College as the only Black woman to attend it; becoming, on March 1, 1864, the first Black woman in the United States to earn a medical degree; her post–Civil War work in Richmond, Virginia, caring for thousands of newly freed people through the Freedmen’s Bureau; her 1883 publication of A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Parts, a 145-page guide on the health of women and children believed to be the first medical book published by an African American author; her death in 1895 and 125 years in an unmarked grave until a headstone was installed in 2020; and history’s decades-long miscrediting of Rebecca Cole (1867) as the first — is from Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, and the Boston University School of Medicine.
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