James McCune Smith

James McCune Smith was born into slavery in New York and barred by the colour of his skin from every college in his own country — and he became the first African American ever to hold a medical degree, at the University of Glasgow. In Scotland he found what America denied him: an education, and a city where he could stand as an equal. He returned home a doctor, a scientist and a formidable campaigner, who used the tools of medicine and statistics to demolish the pseudo-science of racism and to help bring down slavery itself. Glasgow made him a doctor; he, in turn, is among the most remarkable people the city ever taught.

This page tells his story: his birth in slavery, the door Glasgow opened, his life as a student in the city, his medical firsts, his work back in New York, and his long war on racist pseudo-science.

Born into slavery

James McCune Smith was born in New York City in 1813, the son of a woman who had freed herself from slavery. He gained his own freedom as a boy, in 1827, when the state of New York finally abolished slavery within its borders. Educated at the New York African Free School, he showed brilliant promise — but when he applied to the colleges and medical schools of his own country, every door was shut against him on the grounds of his race. A young man of exceptional gifts found himself with nowhere in America to use them.

The door Glasgow opened

The door that America closed, Glasgow opened. In 1832 McCune Smith crossed the Atlantic and enrolled at the University of Glasgow, which admitted him without regard to his colour. He flourished as few students ever have, taking three degrees in five years — a bachelor’s in 1835, a master’s in 1836 and his doctorate in medicine in 1837 — and winning academic prizes along the way. Crucially, Glasgow also trained him in the new science of statistics, giving him an intellectual weapon he would wield for the rest of his life. In Scotland, for the first time, his abilities met no artificial ceiling.

Free air

Glasgow gave McCune Smith more than a training; it gave him a taste of equality. The city had a vigorous anti-slavery movement, and while still an undergraduate he became one of the founding members of the Glasgow Emancipation Society, speaking and organising against the trade that had enslaved his mother. It was a striking irony that a city grown rich on the sugar and tobacco of the slave plantations should also nurse so fierce an abolitionism. Frederick Douglass later said that once McCune Smith had breathed the free air of Scotland, he could imagine a world in which the races were truly equal.

The first African American doctor

With his medical doctorate in 1837, McCune Smith became the first African American ever to hold a university medical degree. He gained clinical experience in the city’s hospitals and became the first African American to be published in a British medical journal — and he used that new authority courageously, helping to expose a cover-up by an ambitious professor who had been experimenting on vulnerable, poor women in the city. It was an early sign of the moral seriousness with which he would always practise medicine: as a science, but never apart from justice.

Doctor & pharmacist

After a short spell of further training in Paris, McCune Smith returned to New York in 1837 to a hero’s welcome from the city’s black community. He opened a medical practice and pharmacy on West Broadway — the first pharmacy in the United States run by an African American — and treated both black and white patients in one of the country’s first racially integrated practices. For some twenty years he served as the physician to the Colored Orphan Asylum, caring for the city’s most defenceless children. He was, by any measure, one of the most accomplished physicians in New York.

Statistics against racism

McCune Smith fought racism with the sharpest tools he had: evidence and reason. When the United States census of 1840 was used to claim, falsely, that free black people suffered far higher rates of insanity than the enslaved, he marshalled a devastating statistical rebuttal that exposed the figures as fraudulent. He publicly demolished the racial theories of Thomas Jefferson and ridiculed the fashionable pseudo-science of phrenology. A prolific writer and editor, he worked closely with Frederick Douglass — writing the introduction to Douglass’s memoir My Bondage and My Freedom — and campaigned for the vote for women as well as for the freedom of the enslaved.

Remembered at last

James McCune Smith died in New York in 1865, at just fifty-two, in the very months that the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished across the United States — the cause of his life won at last. For more than a century his extraordinary story was largely forgotten. In recent years it has been rediscovered, and in 2021 the University of Glasgow named one of its principal new buildings, the James McCune Smith Learning Hub, in his honour — a fitting tribute from the city that had once opened its doors to a young man the rest of the world turned away.

At a glance