Written by: Raccia Abramson
Artwork by: Sheryl Fong
Dr. May Edward Chinn broke boundaries in medicine as one of the first Black female physicians to practice in New York City. She was the first Black woman to graduate from Bellevue Hospital Medical College (which is now the New York University Grossman School of Medicine!) in 1926. She practiced family medicine in Harlem for fifty years, conducted pioneering research on cancer, and left an inspiring legacy for women to come.
Chinn was born in 1896 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and raised in New York. Her father was a former slave from Virginia, and her mother a Black Native American from the Chickahominy people of the Algonquin tribe. Her mother, Lula Ann Evans, worked as a live-in housekeeper and cook at the Long Island mansion of the Tiffany family of jewelry. Growing up, May was treated like a member of the Tiffany family, and because of them she was able to attend musical concerts in New York City, learn to play piano, and learned to speak French and German. Evans managed to save up enough money to send Chinn to the Bordentown Manual and Training Industrial boarding school in New Jersey, but she contracted osteomyelitis of the jaw and had to return to New York for surgery, where she remained because she was too poor to go back and finish high school.
Chinn never earned her high school diploma, but she passed the entrance examination to Columbia Teachers College and matriculated there in 1917. She had initially pursued classical music, until a professor mocked that because of her race she was unfit for classical music. She had done exceptionally well on a scientific paper she wrote about sewage disposal, so she changed her major to science. Chinn was able to secure a full-time position as a lab technician in clinical pathology during her senior year, so she finished her bachelor’s degree in science by taking night classes. She graduated in 1921, then went on to study medicine at Bellevue Medical College, making history as its first Black female alumna.
In the early part of her career, she was denied hospital privileges and research opportunities at New York City hospitals because of how entrenched racism and sexism were in the medical field at that time. The Rockefeller Institute, perhaps misled by her last name and fair skin, were prepared to offer her a research fellowship until they realized that she was Black. Harlem Hospital was the only medical institution willing to hire her. Chinn was the first Black woman to intern at Harlem Hospital as well as the first Black woman to accompany paramedics on ambulance calls. Unfortunately, Harlem Hospital refused to grant her practicing privileges in their hospital, so Dr. Chinn opened a private practice of her own in Harlem, the Edgecombe Sanitarium for non-white patients, where she worked alongside other Black physicians. She was dedicated to providing medical care to people who were otherwise denied care due to racism or classism. As if practicing medicine weren’t enough, she also earned a master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia University in 1933.
She became interested in early cancer diagnosis after seeing many patients who were very ill with terminal diseases, namely late-stage cancer. She wanted to learn more about advanced late stage terminal illness, but like most Black physicians in New York in the 1930s and 40s, she was barred from any association with the city’s hospitals, and the city’s hospital clinics refused to share research information about her patients with her. She had to get creative to pursue this, so she began accompanying her patients to their clinic appointments, explaining that she was the family’s physician. This allowed her to learn more about biopsy techniques and secure firm diagnoses for her patients.
Dr. Chinn conducted groundbreaking research on cancer alongside George Papanicolaou with the Strang Clinic at Memorial Hospital for 30 years. She is credited with helping to develop the Pap smear test to detect cervical cancer, a test which to this day is widely used in women’s health. The Society of Surgical Oncology invited her to become a member, and in 1975, Dr. Chinn established a society to promote Black women to attend medical school. She continued working at her private practice until the age of 81, and passed away in 1980 at age 84.
May Edward Chinn faced countless obstacles in her life due to poverty, racism, and sexism, but she refused to let anything stop her from reaching her full potential. She was incredibly smart, passionate, driven, and resourceful, and her story must be more widely shared so that she gets the recognition she deserves for her prominent role as one of the first Black female physicians in New York City.
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