Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,165

This is the grave of Sarah Fraser.

Born in Syracuse in 1850, Sarah Loguen grew up in an abolitionist household that was middle class for a black northerner of the time. That didn’t mean there was really much money, but the her father was a bishop in the AME church. The house was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, which became more important after the Fugitive Slave Act meant escaped slaves were no longer safe in the North and needed to get to Canada to be sure they were free. Her father also strongly believed in women’s education and so Sarah was well-educated, including in other languages.

In 1873, Loguen saw a kid pinned beneath a wagon. She didn’t know how to help him. She decided at that point to become a doctor. Of course being a woman–and a black woman moreover–did not exactly to a lot of easy opportunities to become a doctor. But her family doctor helped her get what training she could and then Syracuse University admitted her in 1873 to its medical school. She not only graduated, but she became the 4th black woman in American history to get a medical degree. Amazing. She interned at hospitals in Philadelphia and Boston. The New England Hospital for Women and Children only employed women and she liked that. She became an expertise in obstetrics and midwifery and made this her specialty.

When she finished medical school, Loguen had a weird offer. A white classmate offered to marry her. Now, the idea of a white man marrying a black woman was very, very unusual at this time. I am sure he did love her and I am sure he was quite the liberal given what such an offer would mean for his own personal life. But he also phrased it in the context of her career, saying she would need him in order to succeed to give her credibility. That did not go over well and she rejected the offer. But when she was in DC, she lived with her sister. Now, her sister was married to Lewis Douglass, son of Frederick. He took an interest in this young woman and wanted to set her up with someone he thought was a good man. That turned out to be a chemist by the name of Charles Fraser. The match worked out and they married in 1882. Imagine your marriage being set up by Frederick Douglass.

Now, Fraser was working in the Dominican Republic. He owned a pharmacy in Puerto Plata. She was willing to move down there with him. This made the the first woman with a medical license to practice in that nation, which she had gained after a meeting with the president. They had one daughter, but, and this is somewhat ironic given her professional development, she had a midwife that kind of screwed things up. It was a hard pregnancy and she could not have another child. They stayed in the DR until 1894. Charles had a stroke and died. Terrible.

So Fraser moved back to the U.S., given that she didn’t really have a reason to remain in the Dominican Republic. She was a single mother and needed to make a living. She kept the pharmacy going until 1896 before coming back. She moved to Washington and made a go over it there, I think with another pharmacy. At some point, she moved back to Syracuse to be with more of her family and trained black midwives.

But it was hard. She had almost no money. She ended up borrowing money from her sister and brother-in-law, Douglass’s son. But she couldn’t pay them back. She tried to get a job that would pay well and took one at the Blue Plains Industrial School for Boys in Maryland as the doctor, but facing sexism and poor treatment from the staff, she just couldn’t take it and quit. Then worked at a women’s hospital, but the white doctors and nurses were so racist that she quit that too. In fact, she was basically treated as a maid–cooking, cleaning, ironing. There was no respect for her degree, despite the fact that she was much better educated than most of the white women bossing her around. Who can blame her for quitting.

Evidently one of Fraser’s advances–although this is probably a bit of posthoc history since it’s unlikely people would have paid that much attention at the time–is her understanding that colors could relax patients in hospitals. She knit while she was a medical student and certain colors relaxed her so she tried that with patients and they responded well to it too. Color therapy is evidently a thing and this is considered one of the moments that helped lead to an understanding of the psychology of color, though again, I’d like to see more evidence that the powers that were actually paid attention to what an obscure young black woman doctor was doing rather than what I think this is, which is that it was developed by others and then researchers figured out that she was already doing this. None of this is intended to take away from her abilities. Rather, it’s to suggest how limited establishments–medical and otherwise–were to taking any advice from people who were not white men.

The problem with Fraser’s inability to work in an environment that wasn’t racist and sexist is that it meant she was pretty poor. Sure, she had some family money, but she was in limited straits for most of her life after her husband died. She ended up doing domestic work for awhile. Eventually, her family set her up with some kind of basic comfort in her old age. She did a lot of healthcare for her family in return. She died in 1933, at the age of 83, at the home of her daughter.

Sarah Fraser is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, Suitland, Maryland.

If you would like this series to visit other black figures in American medical history, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. David Jones Peck, the first African-American to graduate from a medical school in the United States, is in Granada, Nicaragua, in case you think I need a Central American adventure. More realistically, Robert Tanner Freeman, the first black graduate in dentistry from Harvard, is in Washington, D.C., and James Shobert, the first licensed black doctor to practice in North Carolina, is in Wilmington, North Carolina. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.