James McCune Smith was born in New York in 1813, the son of a woman who had escaped slavery, and was himself freed at fourteen by New York’s Emancipation Act. A star pupil of Manhattan’s African Free School — chosen as a boy to address the visiting Lafayette — he set his course for medicine and met the wall American life had built: every college he applied to refused him for his colour. Abolitionist backers raised his passage instead, and in 1832 the nineteen-year-old sailed for a university that would have him: Glasgow.
The city he arrived in was the booming, smoking Glasgow of this site’s industrial pages, and the Old College on the High Street gave him precisely what America withheld: a fair examination. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1835, his master’s in 1836 and his doctorate of medicine in 1837 — with honours and prizes along the way — becoming the first African American ever to earn a medical degree, in a medical school then among the finest in Europe. He was twenty-four.
Nor was he only studying. McCune Smith threw himself into the city’s anti-slavery movement, becoming a founding and honorary committee member of the Glasgow Emancipation Society in the very years Britain abolished colonial slavery — a Black American abolitionist organising in the city whose sugar and tobacco wealth, as this site’s Trade pages record without flinching, had been built on the trade he fought. Glasgow’s hospitality and Glasgow’s history sat in one frame; he saw both clearly.
His Glasgow finale was an act of moral courage that research has only recently restored. Appointed after graduation to a residency at the Lock Hospital — the grim charity institution off Rottenrow for impoverished women with venereal disease — the young doctor discovered a senior professor, Alexander Hannay, treating patients with an experimental silver nitrate regime that the ward’s own records showed to be agonising, ineffective and dangerous, its failures massaged out of the statistics. McCune Smith interviewed the women, ran the numbers, and published two exposures in the London Medical Gazette in 1837 — the first known scientific papers by an African American, written in Glasgow, in defence of the city’s poorest patients against its medical establishment.
Even his journey home carried the age’s stamp: an American ship’s captain refused the new doctor passage on account of his race, until the Glasgow abolitionist John Murray intervened directly to secure his berth. New York’s Black community received him as a hero, and the rest of the life justified the welcome: the first Black-owned pharmacy in the United States, twenty years’ medical service to the Coloured Orphan Asylum, and a torrent of essays wielding his Glasgow statistical training against the pseudo-science of race — arguing as early as the 1850s that race was a social category, not a biological one.
He stood at the centre of American abolitionism — Frederick Douglass, whose second autobiography he introduced, declared that no man better understood the whole struggle — and he died in November 1865, aged fifty-two, nineteen days before the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification completed the cause of his life. American medicine’s institutions, which had barred him living, spent the next century and a half catching up; the New York Academy of Medicine made him a Fellow in 2018, some 171 years after his nomination.
Glasgow’s own catching-up came in 2021, when the university named its vast new Learning Hub for him — the James McCune Smith building, with a scholarship and annual lecture beside it — so that thousands of students now study daily under the name of the man the Old College examined fairly when nowhere else on earth would. Of all the stories in this chapter, this site would argue, none does the city more honour with less effort: Glasgow simply treated him as a student, and he became one of the great Americans of his century.
The Glasgow connection
McCune Smith’s Glasgow ran from the Old College of the High Street pages to the Lock Hospital off Rottenrow and the Emancipation Society’s meeting rooms — and returns today at the James McCune Smith Learning Hub on Gilmorehill, the university’s largest teaching building, bearing his name.
People also ask
Who was James McCune Smith?
A man born into slavery in New York in 1813 who, barred from every American college because of his race, came to Glasgow, took three degrees, and became the first African American to hold a medical degree — as well as a leading abolitionist and public intellectual.
Why did James McCune Smith study in Glasgow?
Because no American university would admit a Black student. The University of Glasgow, then a stronghold of the anti-slavery movement, accepted him on merit, and abolitionist supporters raised the money to send him there.
What did James McCune Smith achieve?
At Glasgow he earned a bachelor’s degree (1835), a master’s (1836) and a medical degree (1837), all with honours. He became the first African American to hold a medical degree, the first to run a pharmacy in the United States, and the first to publish in medical journals.
What was his connection to Frederick Douglass?
The two were close friends and allies in the abolitionist cause. Douglass called Smith ‘the single most important influence on his life’, and Smith wrote the introduction to Douglass’s autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.
How is James McCune Smith remembered in Glasgow?
The University of Glasgow named a major new building, the James McCune Smith Learning Hub, after him in 2021 — honouring the student it had educated when his own country would not, and reckoning with its own historical ties to slavery.
When did James McCune Smith die?
He died in New York in 1865, having spent his life fighting slavery and using medical statistics to demolish the racist pseudo-science of his age.