Dr. James McCune Smith Awarded Posthumous Fellowship by The New York Academy of Medicine

Seeking to address a 171-year-old act of racial discrimination, The New York Academy of Medicine conferred a posthumous award of Academy Fellowship upon Dr. James McCune Smith (1813-1865), a prominent African-American physician and abolitionist from whom this honor was previously withheld in 1847. The award was presented at the Academy’s 171st Anniversary Discourse & Awards ceremony on November 1, 2018. Professor Joanne Edey-Rhodes, a faculty member in the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, accepted the award on behalf of Dr. McCune Smith’s family.
Dr. McCune Smith was born in New York City in 1813, the son of a freed slave named Lavinia. He sought to study medicine but was not admitted to a U.S. medical school because of his race, so he left to study at the University of Glasgow where he earned a BA, MA and MD, returning to the U.S. as the first university-trained African-American physician. He went on to have a distinguished career, treating both white and black patients in lower Manhattan, as staff physician and later medical director for the Colored Orphans Asylum, and as a pharmacist. He was a scholar as well, publishing the first medical scientific paper by an African-American in this country, and a number of articles that used sophisticated statistical analyses to disprove prevailing theories of racial inferiority. He was also a staunch abolitionist, an ally and friend of the great Frederick Douglass.