Rebecca Cole

Second African American Woman Doctor

Rebecca Cole was born March 16, 1846, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she attended the Institute for Colored Youth, graduating in 1863. In 1867, Rebecca became the second African American woman to receive a medical degree in the United States (Rebecca Crumpler graduated from the New England Female Medical College three years earlier.)


Drawing of Dr. Rebecca Cole

Rebecca was able to overcome racial and gender barriers to medical education by training in all-female institutions run by women who had been part of the first generation of female physicians graduating mid-century. During the Civil War, she entered the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, where she studied under the supervision of Ann Preston, the first woman dean of the school. She graduated from that school, and received a medical degree in 1867.

From 1872-1881, Dr. Cole worked with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first white American woman to receive a medical degree, at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children to gain clinical experience. Blackwell assigned Cole to the post of sanitary visitor, a position in which a traveling physician would visit families in their homes in slum neighborhoods and instruct them in family hygiene, prenatal, and infant care.

Cole went on to practice in Columbia, South Carolina for at time, and then returned to Philadelphia. In 1873, with the assistance of fellow woman physician Charlotte Abbey, Dr. Rebecca Cole started a Women's Directory Center to provide medical and legal services to destitute women and children in Philadelphia.

In January 1899, she was appointed superintendent of a home that was run by the Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington, DC. The annual report for that year reported that she possessed "all the qualities essential to such a position — ability, energy, experience, tact."

A subsequent report noted that:

Dr. Cole herself has more than fulfilled the expectations of her friends. With a clear and comprehensive view of her whole field of action, she has carried out her plans with the good sense and vigor which are a part of her character, while her cheerful optimism, her determination to see the best in every situation and in every individual, have created around her an atmosphere of sunshine that adds to the happiness and well being of every member of the large family.

Although Rebecca Cole practiced medicine for fifty years, few records survive to tell her story, and no images of her remain. Her medical thesis at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania was titled "The Eye and Its Appendages."

Dr. Rebecca Cole died in 1922.

SOURCES
Rebecca Cole
Dr. Rebecca J. Cole
Wikipedia: Rebecca Cole