How a voice from the past resonated with a Black woman medical student

Jasmine Brown, a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, began researching the lives of the first Black women doctors while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. She recounts their careers and her own journey to becoming a physician in her book Twice as Hard, which will be released later this month.

On Jan. 20, Brown will join the Inquirer’s Telling Your Health Story online event to discuss her experience as a writer, student and doctor-in-training. She’ll be joined by Arlene Bennett, the first Black woman to graduate from Penn’s medical school and Eve Higginbotham, Penn’s vice president for diversity and inclusion.

Register at Inquirer.com/live

The following is excerpted from Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century (Beacon Press, 2023). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

As I sat in my cramped dorm room in Oxford, England, I listened to a voice resonating through my laptop. It transported me to the other side of the world. Back home.

“After I got a taste of this thing of college, then I had to have more of the same … I loved it … I mean, my getting back to college, I was delighted. Now my only fear there was that I could not possibly make enough money with my mother to go into the next year. So, I decided to make as much of that year as I could, you see. And so that I could at least say that I had two years of college, or three years of college, you see.”

The sound of Dr. May Chinn’s voice seemed so familiar. It felt as though she was one of my great-grandmothers. Dr. Chinn and I were born a hundred years apart, and she passed away forty years ago. Still, her voice bent through time and touched my soul. I could imagine us sitting on a pillowy couch in a cozy living room, both sipping a hot cup of English Breakfast tea as she told me her life story. She bravely hurdled the challenges of being a black woman entering the unwelcoming field of medicine in the early twentieth century. And she came out on the other side in triumph as a skilled physician who made a huge impact in her patients’ lives.

Her story resonated with me. As a black woman medical student who will be the first in my family to become a physician, I’ve faced my own set of trials. When Dr. Chinn recounted her experience with medical colleagues who disregarded and ostracized her, I felt the burn of salt being rubbed into wounds that have not had the opportunity to heal.