3 sources Dr Nathan Mossel
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https://pennbiomedlibrary.wordpress.com/2023/02/08/black-history-month-dr-nathan-francis-mossell/
Did you know the Mossells family is many of the first at Penn?
Nathan’s brother Aaron Albert Mossell was the first African American to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His niece, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Penn. Also, he is the uncle of Paul Robeson, a well-known singer, actor and activist for African Americans.
https://thepenngazette.com/a-principled-man/
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.
On a hot summer day in August 1890, Mossell opened his front door to find Ella C. Brown, a 24-year-old black prostitute. She told him she was homeless and suffering from abdominal pain and uterine bleeding
Mossell diagnosed fibroid tumors. He treated her, but knew she needed a safe place to rest. He advised Brown to go to the Blockley Almshouse, a charity hospital that wasn't well regarded then for the quality of its care. But Mossell knew his patient had nowhere else to go.
A couple of weeks later, Mossell opened his front door to find a reporter from The Inquirer working on an article about a woman who had delivered a dead infant at the Almshouse and contended that Mossell had charged her $35 for initiating an abortion.
Abortions had been illegal in Pennsylvania since the 1860s; performing one could mean the loss of the doctor's medical license.
Alarmed at what the reporter told him, Mossell immediately took a carriage to the Almshouse. He spoke to the white physicians who treated Brown. They provided a written statement that Mossell didn't know she was pregnant.
Still, Mossell was arrested, his bail set at an extraordinary $3,000 - close to $80,000 today.
Days later, an article appeared in The Inquirer with the headline, "Ella Brown's Serious Charge."
In court, it wasn't Mossell's education and achievements that saved him, but the testimony of the Almshouse's white medical staff.
The willingness of the court to take up such a seemingly weak case highlights the tenuous position of Mossell in particular and black doctors in general. Not only were they racially marginalized, but also, professionally, the field of medicine had yet to earn the social respect the profession receives today.
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