The Melanin Memo
MB EXCLUSIVE · THE 250TH ISSUE · THE FOUNDERS & Healers They Erased
America built its medicine on Black knowledge, Black brilliance, and Black bodies then took the cure and buried the names. On the country's 250th birthday, we say them.
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS · 1721 Smallpox is moving through Boston like fire through a
woodpile, and the man who holds the knowledge to stop it is property. His name is Onesimus.
He is an enslaved West African, given years earlier to the Puritan minister Cotton Mather by his
congregation, and he carries in his own skin in a small, deliberate scar on his arm
a medical technology older than the colony he now serves. Long before he was
stolen, in his homeland, he had been inoculated: a healer had taken a trace of live
smallpox from a sick person and worked it into a cut, giving him a mild case and then
a lifetime of immunity. He tells Mather he can never catch the disease that is now
emptying Boston's houses. He is describing, a full seventy-five years before Edward
Jenner's cowpox vaccine, the principle that will one day end smallpox on Earth.
The knowledge was African. The credit would not be.
This is the story America will not run today. On the country's 250th birthday, every
major outlet is airing the same reel the same three marble founders, the same
clean myth of a nation born free and self-made. Melanin Bliss Media covers health
equity, so we are running the founders that reel erases: the people who built
American medicine itself. Because the uncomfortable truth on this anniversary is
that the nation's medical foundation was poured out of three things it refuses to
name Black knowledge, Black bodies, and Black brilliance and then the record
was scrubbed of the people who supplied all three. Here is what the country took.
Here is what it gave back.
SECTION ONE — The Knowledge
Onesimus and the Cure Boston Almost Refused
When Mather asked whether he had ever had smallpox, Onesimus answered “Yes
and No” — no, not the deadly way Bostonians caught it, and yes, he had taken
something of it on purpose and been made safe. Mather, intrigued, gathered
corroborating accounts from other enslaved Africans in the city and found the
practice was common across West Africa. In 1721, as the epidemic raged, he begged
Boston's physicians to try it. Only one, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, agreed.
The results were staggering for their time. Of the roughly 240 people Boylston
inoculated, about 2 percent died; of the thousands who caught smallpox the ordinary
way, closer to 14 percent did. Boston did not respond with gratitude. Mather was
vilified; someone threw a lit grenade through his window with a note attached. The
objection was partly medical and partly this: the method had come from Africa, from
the enslaved, and the city could not bear to be saved by the people it had bought and
sold. Onesimus eventually secured a measure of his own freedom by paying his
enslaver — the man whose household he had likely spared from the disease.
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2Onesimus described the technique that would seed modern
immunization. The history books gave the discovery to the minister who
wrote it down. — MB
The line from that scar on Onesimus's arm runs straight to Jenner, to the eradication
of smallpox in 1980, to every vaccine that follows. It is one of the most consequential
pieces of medical knowledge ever to reach these shores — and it arrived in the body
of an enslaved man whose full name, birthplace, and burial are all lost to us.
SECTION TWO — The Bodies Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey — The Mothers of Gynecology No
One Named For decades, American medicine called J. Marion Sims the “father of modern
gynecology.” A statue of him stood in New York's Central Park until 2018. What the
title left out is whose bodies bought it. Between 1845 and 1849, on a small slave
hospital he built in his Montgomery, Alabama backyard, Sims performed dozens of
experimental surgeries to repair vesicovaginal fistula a devastating childbirth
injury on enslaved Black women he did not free and could not have operated on
without their enslavers' permission.
He did it without anesthesia. Ether had become available during those very years,
but Sims declined to use it on them, leaning on a lie that ran through American
medicine then and echoes in it now: that Black people felt less pain. One woman,
Anarcha, is recorded as enduring some thirty operations. Two others whose names
survive Lucy and Betsey endured their own. Dozens more were never named at
all. Only after Sims had perfected the technique on enslaved women, who could not
refuse, did he perform it on white women, who received anesthesia.
Modern gynecology has founding mothers. Their names were Anarcha,
Lucy, and Betsey and the discipline built on their bodies spent a
century and a half honoring the man who held the knife. MB
This is the foundation health-equity reporting cannot look away from. The
instruments, the techniques, the specialty itself carry the fingerprints of women who
were experimented on as property. When Black women today report that their pain
is minimized in labor and delivery rooms a pattern documented in study after
study they are not describing a new bias. They are describing the founding
assumption of the field, still running underneath the floor.
SECTION THREE — The Brilliance They Buried
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3 Black Americans did not only supply the knowledge and the bodies. They produced
the doctors often barred from their own country's schools, and almost always
written out of its story. Here are five.
1 · James McCune Smith — The First, Who Had to Leave the Country
to Become It
Born in New York in 1813 and freed as a boy by the state's Emancipation Act, James
McCune Smith was brilliant, and every American medical school he applied to
turned him away for his race. So he sailed to Scotland. At the University of Glasgow
he earned a bachelor's, a master's, and — in 1837 — a medical degree, becoming the
first African American to hold one. Home in New York he ran a pharmacy and a
practice serving Black and white patients alike, and became the first Black American
to publish in the nation's medical journals. When the 1840 census was used to claim
that free Black people suffered higher rates of insanity, Smith dismantled the
numbers statistically and publicly, exposing the data as fraud. America would not
educate him. He corrected its science anyway.
2 · Rebecca Lee Crumpler — First to the Degree, First to the Book
In 1864, at the New England Female Medical College, Rebecca Lee Crumpler
became the first African American woman to earn an M.D. in the United States.
When the Civil War ended she went to Richmond, Virginia, to care for newly freed
people the medical establishment would not touch. In 1883 she published A Book of
Medical Discourses, drawn from her notes on the health of women and children —
among the earliest medical texts written by any Black American. For years no known
photograph of her existed; she had done the work without ever being fully seen.
3 · David Jones Peck — The First Diploma on American Soil
While Smith had to cross an ocean, David Jones Peck became, in 1847, the first
African American to graduate from an American medical school, at Rush Medical
College in Chicago. He went on to practice and to organize against slavery. The
milestone should be famous. Ask most Americans who the first Black graduate of a
U.S. medical school was, and you will be met with silence.
4 · Susie King Taylor — The Army Nurse Who Also Taught the Soldiers to Read
Born enslaved in Georgia in 1848, Susie King Taylor spent the Civil War attached to
the first authorized regiment of Black soldiers, serving as nurse, laundress, and
teacher tending the wounded by day and teaching soldiers their letters by night.
She worked alongside Clara Barton. In 1902 she published her memoir, the only
firsthand account of the war left to us by a Black woman. The Red Cross remembers
Barton. Almost no one remembers the woman beside her.
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45 · Daniel Hale Williams — The Surgeon Who Opened a Chest and a Door Shut out of
hospitals that would not train Black nurses or admit Black doctors, Daniel Hale Williams simply
built his own: Provident Hospital in Chicago, founded in 1891, the nation's first Black-owned
interracial hospital, with a training school for Black nurses attached. Two years later, in 1893, he
opened a patient's chest and repaired a knife wound to the sac around the heart one of the first
successful heart surgeries in recorded history. The patient lived for years. The surgeon spent
his life building the institutions his country refused to build for him.
THE MB THROUGH-LINE
What I See From the Health Equity Desk
I cover health equity for a living. My beat is the algorithm that denies a prior
authorization, the budget that guts a Black hospital, the maternal-mortality gap for
Black women that has barely moved in a decade. And the deeper I report, the more I
recognize the same architecture the founders poured.
The Declaration said all men are created equal.
Today a risk model decides who gets approved for care by using past healthcare spending as a
stand-in for need and because Black patients were always given less, the machine reads them
as needing less, and quietly recommends them for less. That is Sims's assumption in a server
rack. It is the 1840 census Smith already debunked, rewritten in code. The bias is not
a glitch in the system. It is the system, working exactly as it was built to — in 1721, in
1849, and in 2026. Only the interface has changed. We built the cure, the field, and the
hospital. The country took all three and kept the names off the record. On its 250th birthday,
we are putting them back. — Amber K. McClendon
Happy birthday, America. MB will keep running the stories you won't.
— Amber K. McClendon
MELANIN BLISS MEDIA · Health Equity Journalism · www.melaninblissmedia.com
Sources
https://www.nps.gov
Reputable institutions and scholarship. Confirm exact article paths before publication.
The Knowledge — Onesimus
— History.com — How an Enslaved African Man Helped Boston Fight Smallpox
https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather
— Smithsonian Magazine — Onesimus and inoculation in colonial Boston
https://www.smithsonianmag.com
— Harvard University — Onesimus (Contributors to science & the 1721 epidemic)
https://library.harvard.edu
— National Park Service / Boston — 1721 smallpox inoculation controversy The Bodies — Anarcha, Lucy & Betsey
— National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) https://nmaahc.si.edu
— Deirdre Cooper Owens — Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American
Gynecology (Univ. of Georgia Press) https://ugapress.org
— JAMA / peer-reviewed history of J. Marion Sims and enslaved patients https://jamanetwork.com
— History.com — The 'Father of Modern Gynecology' and the enslaved women he experimented
on https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves
The Brilliance — McCune Smith, Crumpler, Peck, Taylor, Williams
— U.S. National Library of Medicine — Changing the Face of Medicine (Crumpler; Black
physicians) https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov
— Columbia University / historians — James McCune Smith, first African American M.D.
https://www.columbia.edu
— Rush University — David Jones Peck, first Black graduate of a U.S. medical school
https://www.rush.edu
— National Park Service — Susie King Taylor https://www.nps.gov/people/susie-king-taylor.htm
— Library of Congress — Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902)
https://www.loc.gov
— Britannica / U.S. NLM — Daniel Hale Williams and Provident Hospital
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Hale-Williams
— National Women's History Museum — Crumpler & Taylor profiles
https://www.womenshistory.org
The Throughline — Algorithmic Bias in Care
— Obermeyer et al., Science (2019) — Racial bias in a health-care risk algorithm
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax2342
— KFF — Medicaid cuts and coverage loss among people of color — CDC — Working Together to Reduce Black Maternal Mortality https://www.kff.org
https://www.cdc.gov/womens-
health/features/maternal-mortality.html
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