During this year, when we are celebrating our 250th anniversary, it is important to recognize the contributions of African Americans to building the institution we are today. Our archives provide a rich source of information that reveals the importance of personal resilience and significant institutional milestones.
The medical school opened its doors in 1765, and graduated just 10 students in 1768; however, neither women or people of color were represented among this first graduates. It would be another 80 plus years until the first person of color graduated from a medical school in the U.S. But during the late 1700s, some African Americans were out there practicing medicine, including one Philadelphia native who played a small but interesting part in Penn’s medical education history.
Born a slave in Philadelphia, James Derham moved to New Orleans in 1783 when he was hired by a Scottish physician to practice alongside him. He then bought his freedom and opened up his own practice, until a man who would go on to become one of Penn’s most famous faculty members encouraged him to come home.
"I conversed with him on medicine and surgery and found him learned,” Benjamin Rush said, according to a historical report from the Journal of the National Medical Association, after a visit to New Orleans. “I thought I could give him information concerning the treatment of disease, but I learned more from him than he could expect from me”.
In 1788, Derham then returned to Philly and became a well-known throat disease expert, but headed back to New Orleans shortly thereafter to help fight the yellow fever epidemic.
Derham and Rush, now teaching at the medical school, continued to correspond via letters, though, exchanging ideas—and even a pamphlet on how to treat chicken pox—and other personal matters. Rush, who adamantly opposed slavery, appears to have learned a lot about medicine from Derham. He was reportedly so impressed with Derham’s ability to treat diphtheria patients, he read his paper on the disease before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, though they snubbed the content*. Later, it was believed that Derham was shut down by local authorities in New Orleans because of a lack of an official medical degree, and then he disappeared. He was thought to have died of a heart attack in 1802.
Surely there are more stories like this from the 18th century to be told, but one of the most noteworthy events next on the school’s timeline happened in 1879, the year it admitted an African American man for the first time.
A standout among his peers, Nathan Francis Mossell took second honors in his graduating class and was trained first by Dr. D. Hayes Agnew, anatomy professor and chair of Surgery at Penn, in the Outpatient Surgical Clinic of the University Hospital. (That’s Mossell up top in the photo with his family). After leaving the colonies for Europe to secure an internship after graduation—it was much easier for African Americans to train overseas—Mossell returned to Philadelphia in 1888, the same year he was elected to the Philadelphia County Medical Society, making him the first African American physicia
n to achieve this honor.
Worth mentioning is Albert Monroe Wilson, a jack-of-all-trades at Penn, who Mossell described as a man with “considerable ability” in his biography. Wilson was not officially enrolled in the medical school, but he was permitted to attend many of the lectures during the end of his tenure at Penn, where he worked as a janitor, a messenger and eventually a laboratory assistant in the medical school. Wilson, pictured to the right, was charged with setting up equipment for professor John Fries Frazer’s lectures and experiments in chemistry and physics. He went onto to become a respected “medical healer” in the African American community.
Forty-five years later in 1959, the first African American woman is accepted into the school of medicine at Penn, 45 years after women are accepted. It’s now the late 50s/early 60s and the Civil Rights movement is in full swing, with many colleges and universities finally opening the doors to women and people of color following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Arlene Bennett, a Philadelphia native, graduates and goes onto to become a successful psychiatrist.
Last year, she spoke at commencement for the Perelman School of Medicine, which also marked her 50th year since graduating, and in December received the Elizabeth Kirk Rose award at the annual Women in Medicine luncheon at Penn for her work.
“As I look back, I feel impressed,” Bennett said at the time of the award to the Pulse, speaking about being the first African American woman to graduate from the school of medicine. “In those days, it didn’t mean anything, though. We were too busy burning the midnight oil. I was among a very supportive class. We were very close. We had a good time together, studying but also attending music events. I’m thrilled that the school has maintained such a high level of support and collegiality through the years.”
Another important milestone in Penn’s history took place five years after Bennett graduated, though this doctor’s imprint dates further back than that. In 1969, Helen Octavia Dickens—whom you may have seen on our Facebook page last week—became the medical school’s first African American female full professor. She was a woman of firsts.
Before teaching at Penn, in 1945, she received her Master of Science from its school of medicine, and five years later became the first African American woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons.
The daughter of a former slave, Dickens joined Penn Medicine’s obstetrics and g
ynecology department in 1956 and became the first female African American board-certified Ob/Gyn in Philadelphia. She later went on to found the Teen Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania, providing care for school-age mothers in the city. She also established the Office of Minority Affairs in 1969 and within five years had increased minority enrollment from three students to 64.
The founding of that office has preserved the school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion through the 70s, 80s, and 90s up to today.
Building off that commitment, in 2013, Eve Higginbotham, SM, MD, was named the first Vice Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at the Perelman School of Medicine’s renamed Office of Inclusion and Diversity (IOD), highlighting the importance of an institutional climate in building a more diverse PSOM community. The OID coordinates and interacts with a number of programs aimed at building a culture of inclusion, including the Program on Diversity and Inclusion led by Horace Delisser, MD, and also includes Cindy Christianson, Roy Hamilton, and Benoit Dube, MD, in medical education.
Higginbotham was the first woman to head an ophthalmology department at an academic medical center in the United States, serving as chair of the Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Her appointment, in a way, kicks off the next 250 years of African American milestones and players bound to make a difference here at Penn and around the world.
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*"Dr. James Durham, Mysterious Eighteenth-Century Black Physician: Man or Myth?" The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103 (No. 3): 325–333