Kathryne Dycus
United States

In Twice As Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, From the Civil War to the 21^st Century, Jasmine Brown hands us a collection of Black women physicians’ narratives and inserts her own into the mix. “Initially, I wanted to look at past socio-structural barriers preventing Black women from entering medicine,” Brown says, “to get insight into what was happening in the present.” As the Stanford ophthalmology resident investigated the oral histories of these women, she learned about their barriers but also their triumphs.

Brown had not met a Black woman physician until she began graduate studies at Oxford while on a Rhodes scholarship. She had no idea that Black women have been practicing medicine in the United States for more than 150 years. The first Black woman physician in the US was Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, who was in medical school in the 1860s when slavery was still legal. “Seeing that Black women have been doing this for decades, for over a century,” Brown says, “made me want to learn about their journeys, even for my own motivation as someone who is pursuing medicine.”

The seeds for this book were planted at Oxford, and Brown later wrote the book during medical school at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where these women’s narratives kept her going when times got tough. Writing was respite from medical school and vice versa. “These women have done things that are harder than what I’ve gone through,” Brown says. “Throughout my medical journey, there are different lessons I take from these stories. I find comfort in knowing that despite the obstacles I face, I can still succeed, because I’ve seen these women succeed who have gone before me.” Brown hopes that her book serves as a motivator for anyone who has been made to feel that they do not belong in a particular space.

When asked which of these women she most identifies with, Brown responds, “It depends on the moment.” However, one woman—Dr. Dorothy Ferebee—stands out. Ferebee was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Black sorority in the US, as is Brown. “Dr. Ferebee created the first mobile clinic in the US to counter the Great Depression and the oppression sharecroppers experienced in the South,” she states, “by bringing medical help to them.” The sorority brought back those mobile health clinics during the COVID pandemic, conducting testing and making vaccines more accessible. “I see those connections through time of my experience and her experience,” Brown says.

Dr. May Chinn’s story also resonates with Brown deeply. During her time at Oxford, Brown found several oral histories in the Radcliffe Institute’s online archives, including Chinn’s. “I remember listening to her voice as she was telling her story,” she recalls. “It felt so familiar. I didn’t know if it was the tenor in her voice, but it felt like she could have been one of my great-grandmothers. She was born 100 years before me but some of the things she spoke about resonated beyond that first moment of ‘wow, this person is here.’”

Sometimes the best physicians are those who have something outside of medicine that reenergizes them and provides aesthetic value. For Dr. May Chinn, the first African American woman to graduate from New York University Medical College in 1926, it was music. Even before medical school, Chinn worked as a piano accompanist to Paul Robeson, a famous African American bass baritone and leader of the Harlem Renaissance. From that time onward, music accompanied Chinn’s medical career.

Not only was Chinn creative in the musical space of the Harlem Renaissance, but she also had to innovate within the space of obstacles. Her Black patients were not allowed to go to certain hospitals, so she worked alongside a surgeon to perform surgeries in their homes. “It’s shocking to me that some hospitals that I’ve worked in were a part of that history of turning away patients who looked like me,” Brown says. Chinn and her colleague would set up a dining room table or bed for surgery and sterilize their medical instruments in the oven, using everyday household items as part of their medical toolkits. “The two would be on call potentially for days, until the patient was able to get up and well enough to not have a doctor present,” Brown explains. “As a surgical resident, I have a deep understanding of the dedication it took for them to be on call around the clock until their patients had recovered from surgery.”

In addition to a career in medicine, Jasmine Brown’s journey parallels Chinn’s in that Brown turns to art as a way of celebrating beauty in life. “I was a painter before I was a writer,” Brown says. “I went into undergrad as a double major in painting and neuroscience. When I was younger, I considered being a professional artist but ended up leaning more towards medicine instead. I liked both, but I didn’t want to become resentful of my art if it was tied to my ability to put food on the table. I wanted to be free in what I created and not worry about others’ perception of its value.”

In Twice As Hard, Brown profiles a host of memorable Black women physicians, including Drs. Edith Irby Jones and Dr. Joycelyn Elders, whose stories are housed in the University of Arkansas archives. Outside of historically Black medical schools like Meharry Medical College, Irby Jones was the first Black woman to attend a medical school in the South, a few years before Brown vs. Board of Education. Because she was enrolled at a predominantly white institution during the Jim Crow years, she experienced forms of discrimination that sought to ostracize her. For instance, Black and white students couldn’t eat together in public, so Irby Jones could not eat in the cafeteria with her fellow classmates, and she had to use the custodial bathroom since only white women were allowed to access the women’s bathroom. And although a few of Irby Jones’s white classmates came to dine with her in the library, which was considered a private space and therefore outside the realm of segregated control, “she was largely by herself,” Brown says. Irby Jones also spoke about how she had to exercise caution when studying with her classmates after hours, because being caught studying with her classmates in a white person’s home invited unwanted threats and potential physical harm. “I’m so grateful I never experienced that level of oppression,” Brown says, “so when I face challenges, I think, this feels hard but these women have done harder things. Their stories encourage me to keep working and moving forward despite the obstacles I face.”

Brown says that making these women’s narratives more accessible is akin to “healing her inner child.” She remembers an elementary school event in which she spoke to young girls about their futures. After her talk, one girl raised her hand and told Brown she wanted to be a surgeon one day. “Having those moments of talking to these young people make me think about how I never had that opportunity when I was younger, to see that kind of example,” Brown says. Through her work, she is able to serve as that example for them.

“I hope that these stories inspire people to feel like they can make a positive difference in some way, and that even if the goal feels too ambitious or too out of reach, they should still try,” Brown says. “For the young people who’ve been told that they can’t pursue some kind of career for whatever reason, know that there are people out there who have succeeded in spaces in which they weren’t meant to. But even if no such examples exist in your chosen path, you can be the first, like these women.”

Work cited

Brown, Jasmine. Twice As Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, From the Civil War to the 21^st Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2023. Available via Bookshop.org.