Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler

It was March 1, 1864, in Boston.

The country was in the middle of the Civil War. That day, the board of the New England Female Medical College named a new Doctor of Medicine. Her name was Rebecca Lee.

She had completed three years of courses. She had written a thesis. She had passed her oral examinations.

She was the school's only African American student. That day, she became the first African American woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.

She was born Rebecca Davis on February 8, 1831, in Delaware.

As a child, she grew up in Pennsylvania, with an aunt. That aunt cared for sick neighbours. From her came the wish to heal.

Around 1852, she settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts. She became a nurse, without formal training. For eight years, she worked under different doctors.

In 1852, she married Wyatt Lee, a formerly enslaved man from Virginia. He died of tuberculosis in April 1863, less than a year before her degree.

In 1860, the women's medical college in Boston had accepted her. She held a scholarship in each of her three years.

Then the war ended. In May 1865, she married Arthur Crumpler in Saint John, New Brunswick. He too had escaped slavery in Virginia.

After practising briefly in Boston, Rebecca Lee Crumpler went south. In Richmond, Virginia, people newly freed from slavery needed care. Many white doctors refused to treat them.

She saw her place there:

She worked with the Freedmen's Bureau and with missionary groups.

It was not easy. Some doctors ignored her. She struggled to get her prescriptions filled. Some mocked the letters "M.D." after her name. They read them as "Mule Driver."

She kept going.

In the late 1860s, she returned to Boston. She settled on Joy Street, on Beacon Hill, a mostly African American neighbourhood.

There, she cared for poor women and children. She did not look at who could pay.

In 1880, she moved to Hyde Park, and stopped practising.

But she was not done caring. In 1883, she published A Book of Medical Discourses. She drew it from her years of practice. She dedicated it to nurses and to mothers.

The book spoke of infants, children and women. It stressed one simple idea: illness can often be prevented.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler died on March 9, 1895, in Hyde Park. She was buried in Fairview Cemetery.

For 125 years, her grave had no stone. No name.

Her way of caring echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing. Like her aunt before her, she cared first for her neighbours, and for those others left aside.

On July 16, 2020, granite headstones were finally placed. A fundraising appeal by the Friends of the Hyde Park Library had paid for them.

And on Joy Street, her house became a stop on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

A name long forgotten, carved in granite. A house, on a Boston street, that keeps her story.