When Nathan Mossell crossed the stage of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music to receive his medical diploma in the spring of 1882, his white peers saluted him with “almost deafening applause,” he wrote in his short autobiography. As an honor student graduating in the top quarter of his class, Mossell had triumphed over the virulent racism displayed by many of his classmates and professors. But now, with diploma in hand, Penn’s first black doctor gazed out upon the cheering young men, confident that despite the formidable odds he would surely face, his talent and persistence would enable him to triumph.
That brief moment of hope and good will would not last. Excluded from the staff of Philadelphia’s white hospitals and from the College of Physicians, Mossell soon found himself in an increasingly untenable position as a doctor. He would go on to found the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School in 1895, serving as its chief of staff for 38 years. But while he fought hard for, and took pride in, the accomplishments of the city’s first black hospital, he was adamant that it should never have been needed. He also ran it, by some accounts, in a tyrannical fashion that excluded many of the same black doctors the hospital was supposed to help.