New evidence has emerged of the first known paper to be published in a British medical journal by a Black person.
Nineteenth century doctor James McCune Smith was a pioneer in the use of medical statistics, which he used to expose a scandal that saw women subjected to a harmful experimental treatment for a sexually transmitted disease.
Research led by Matthew Daniel Eddy, professor of philosophy at Durham University (UK), shows that McCune Smith published two research papers during the spring and summer of 1837 in the weekly journal the London Medical Gazette.
Using statistical evidence and interviews with the affected women, McCune Smith revealed the dangerous practices of a senior hospital doctor, Alexander Hannay, who used silver nitrate to treat women for gonorrhoea at Glasgow’s Lock Hospital. Silver nitrate was normally used as a last resort and in low concentration to treat infected skin tissue or to stop bleeding.
Women treated by Hannay reported painful burning sensations and one suffered a miscarriage. McCune Smith’s research also intimated that some patients died after they had received treatment.
McCune Smith was born in 1813, the son of a runaway slave who had escaped to New York City.
Having had his medical school applications denied in the U.S. due to his race, he travelled to the UK in 1832 and trained in medicine at the University of Glasgow. He was the first Black man or woman to receive a medical doctorate from a university.
Eddy found McCune Smith’s London Medical Gazette papers in the National Library of Scotland, in Edinburgh. He also worked with librarian Robert MacLean, in the University of Glasgow’s Archives and Special Collections, where they were able to find McCune Smith’s library borrowing record. This showed he had taken the university’s moral philosophy class, which encouraged students to judge the accuracy of statistics when making moral decisions.
Eddy believes McCune Smith’s university training at Glasgow fueled his desire to research and write the papers published in the London Medical Gazette about the experimental treatment of women.
“McCune Smith was a real pioneer of using data to examine the effectiveness of medical treatments from the perspective of both patients and physicians, something that is more readily practised in the medical profession today," said Eddy. “He was also extremely brave. Here was a young doctor, not long out of medical school, in a foreign country and the easiest thing for him to do when faced with his findings would have been to say nothing. Instead, he was willing to take on the establishment and use his skills to show that the practices of a much more senior doctor were arguably dangerous and harmful to the women who were being experimented on.”
Upon returning to the U.S., McCune Smith set up his own practice in New York and became a leading Black physician, a tireless campaigner for the abolition of slavery, an activist and journalist.
In 2021, the University of Glasgow named its new learning hub in his honour.
“McCune Smith is a fascinating character who deserves to be celebrated as one of the great medical visionaries of his time whose patient-centred approach almost 200 years ago is still relevant to modern medical research," concluded Eddy.
Republished courtesy of Durham University. Photo: A portrait Dr James McCune Smith. Credit: University of Glasgow