Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Having gained his medical education at Glasgow University, McCune Smith returned to New York City to establish himself. Difficulties in his acceptance were evidenced by the New York Academy of Medicine's refusal of membership and the New York Medical and Surgical Society preventing him from presenting in person at a meeting. He can claim the first peer-reviewed publication and presentation by an African American physician and interacted with both the elite of New York's medical establishment and his unqualified fellow African American colleagues. Whilst writing and lecturing on a range of medical topics, his most memorable achievements lie in the essays on climate, longevity, racial equality and civilisation. In each, he showed a mastery of quantitative analysis, physiology, comparative anatomy and the medical textbooks of the time. It is not just as a physician and pharmacist that he should be remembered but also as the foremost black social scientist of his era with an enquiring analytical approach learnt from and revealed in his Glasgow years. This article will examine his medical practice and writings as well as those essays that displayed his scientific knowledge.
Source: Journal of Medical Biography
Author: Ian Bone
Institution: University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Glasgow
OpenAlex ID: W7117579205