Nathan Francis Mossell
Nathan Francis Mossell was the first AfricanAmerican graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1882. He did postgraduate training at hospitals in Philadelphia and London. In 1888, he was the first black physician elected as member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society in Pennsylvania. He helped found the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School in West Philadelphia in 1895, which he led as chiefofstaff and medical director until he retired in 1933.
Nathan Mossell was born in Hamilton, Canada in 1856, the fourth of six children. Both his parents, Eliza Bowers and Aaron Albert Mossell I , were descended from freed slaves. According to Mossells autobiography, his mothers stories of the discrimination and hardship their families faced strengthened her own childrens determination to succeed. Mossells maternal grandfather had resisted all attempts by his owner to make him work and was eventually freed. He married and settled in Baltimore, but the entire family, including Mossells mother, who was a child at the time, were deported to Trinidad. Mossells paternal grandfather, who had been transported from the coast of West Africa, managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife. He too settled in Baltimore, where Mossells father was born.
Source: Wikipedia