More info about Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell - founding of MDH

Nathan Francis Mossell Papers

Nathan Francis Mossell was born in Hamilton, Canada, on July 27, 1856. His parents eventually settled in Lockport, New York circa 1865, where Nathan spent the majority of his childhood. In 1873, Mossell entered Lincoln University’s preparatory program, receiving a Bachelors degree in 1879. While at Lincoln, he met and courted his future wife, Gertrude Hicks Bustill(1855-1948) and after graduation, decided to pursue a medical education in Philadelphia, a city that served as the national center of American medical education during the nineteenth century.

Dr. Mossell serves as a pioneer among African American medical professionals in the late nineteenth century, paving an educational as well as professional path for both black men and women in Philadelphia as physicians and nurses. In 1879, Mossell became one of the first African Americans enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1882, Mossell was the first African American to receive a diploma from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

Dr. Mossell established the first private black hospital in the city and the second in the United States, the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School at 1512 Lombard Street. With few options available to black physicians during the 1880s, Douglass Hospital not only served as the first institution devoted to treating and healing black bodies in the city, but also symbolically represented one of the earliest efforts to initiate the rise of a respected, professional class of African American men and women.

Nathan Francis Mossell

Mossell went on to study at the University of University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he experienced significant racism, graduating in 1882[citation needed] as its first African-American graduate.[ 1] He did post-graduate training at hospitals in Philadelphia, including the Pennsylvania University Hospital, and later at Guy's Hospital, Queen's Hospital, and St Thomas' Hospital in London.

After his return to the United States, in 1888 Mossell became the first black physician elected as member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society. That year he also started his private practice. In 1895, he helped found the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School in West Philadelphia, serving as its chief-of-staff and medical director until his retirement in 1933.

Mossell's parents met and married in Baltimore after his mother's family return from Trinidad. His father learned the brickmaking trade and saved enough money to buy a house. After the birth of their third child, the couple decided to move to Canada, as free blacks were prohibited from being educated in Maryland and they wanted education for their children. They sold their house in Baltimore and settled in Hamilton, Ontario. His father bought a tract of clay-bearing land and set up his own brickworks.[ 3][4]

After retiring as director of the hospital in 1933, Mossell continued to work in his private practice, which he had opened in 1888.

He died on October 27, 1946, in Philadelphia at the age of 90.[ 6] He was believed to be the oldest practicing black physician at the time of his death.[ 6]

Nathan Francis Mossell

Mossell’s influence was felt in other ways as well. He was a co-founder of the Philadelphia Academy of Medicine and Allied Sciences (an association for African Americans in medicine) in 1900, a founder and director of the Philadelphia branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910, and a member of the Niagara Movement organized by W.E.B. DuBois in 1905. During the 1880s and 1890s Mossell was one of the first to pressure for the hiring of Black professors at his alma mater Lincoln University; from 1891 into the 1940s, he pushed for the integration of Girard College. He also worked with state representative Arthur Faucett to pass a bill banning exclusion of Blacks from university housing at Penn.

impact on Philadelphia medical practice and on the position of African Americans in the city and beyond. In August of 1895 he became the leading figure in the founding of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School – the second Black hospital in the United States, and one that would not only treat African American patients, but also offer interships to Black doctors and nursing training to Black women. Dr. Mossell’s former Penn professors (including Agnew, Tyson, Pepper, and Leidy) were among the initial contributors, and Eugene T. Hinson, M. D. 1898, was one of the hospital’s African American physicians. Since its establishment of a 15-bed facility in a house at 1512 Lombard Street, Douglass Hospital has had a history of supporting the African American community in Philadelphia. In 1909, a new building with 75 beds opened at 1534 Lombard Street. In 1948, two years after Mossell’s death, Douglass Hospital merged with another predominantly black hospital, Mercy, to create Mercy Douglass Hospital on Woodland Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets in West Philadelphia.

This hospital continued its care of African American Philadelphians until its closing in 1973. Mossell worked for over thirty-five years as the hospital’s chief-of-staff and medical director, retiring in 1933. He continued his private medical practice, however, until shortly before his death in October of 1946, at the age of ninety.

DMU Timestamp: February 26, 2025 22:37

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