was an American physician,
apothecary,
abolitionist, and author. He is the first African American to hold a medical degree and graduated at the top in his class at the
University of Glasgow, Scotland. He was the first African American to run a
pharmacy in the United States.
In addition to practicing as a doctor for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. Invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a new science, he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded
American Geographic Society. But, he was never admitted to the
American Medical Association or local medical associations.
He has been most well known for his leadership as an abolitionist; a member of the
American Anti-Slavery Society, with
Frederick Douglass he helped start the National Council of Colored People in 1853, the first permanent national organization for blacks. Douglass said that Smith was "the single most important influence on his life."
[1] Smith was one of the Committee of Thirteen, who organized in 1850 in New York City to resist the newly passed
Fugitive Slave Law by aiding fugitive slaves through the
Underground Railroad. Other leading abolitionist activists were among his friends and colleagues. From the 1840s, he lectured on race and abolitionism and wrote numerous articles to refute racist ideas about black capacities.
The first African American to receive a medical degree, this invaluable collection brings together the writings of James McCune Smith, one of the foremost intellectuals in antebellum America.
The Works of James McCune Smith is one of the first anthologies featuring the works of this illustrious scholar. Perhaps best known for his introduction to Fredrick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, his influence is still found in a number of aspects of modern society and social interactions. And he was considered by many to be a prophet of the twenty-first century.
One of the earliest advocates of the use of "black" instead of "colored," McCune Smith treated racial identities as social constructions, arguing that American literature, music, and dance would be shaped and defined by blacks.
The absence of James McCune Smith in the historiographic and critical literature is even more striking. He was a brilliant scholar, writer, and critic, as well as a first rate physician. In 1882 the black leader Alexander Crummell called him "the most learned Negro of his day," and Frederick Douglass considered him the most important black influence in his life (much as he considered Gerrit Smith the most important white one). Douglass was probably correct when, in 1859, he publicly stated: "No man in this country more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery, than does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his understanding."
As a prose stylist and original thinker, McCune Smith ranks, at his best, alongside such canonical figures as Emerson and Thoreau. His essays are sophisticated and elegant, his interpretations of American culture are way ahead of his time, and his experimental style and use of dialect anticipates some of the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920s. Yet McCune Smith has been completely ignored by literary critics; and aside from one article on him, he has remained absent from the historical record.
