James McCune Smith

Physician, born in New York City, New York, USA. The son of a slave freed by the laws of New York, he gained his medical degree from the University of Glasgow, Scotland (1837) and practised briefly in Paris before returning to New York. He worked for 20 years on the medical staff of the Free Negro Orphan Asylum. He devoted his life to the welfare of African-Americans and to insisting on their moral and physical equality with whites. A prolific writer, he opposed the American Colonization Society's plan to repatriate African-Americans and he was active in the Underground Railroad.

James McCune Smith (1813 – November 17, 1865), born to an enslaved mother in New York, was the first professionally trained African-American doctor.

Since American colleges would not admit him because he was black, he attended the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he received a doctorate in medicine in 1837. McCune Smith also wrote the introduction to Douglass' second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), which constituted an important move away from seeking approval and authentication from white abolitionists in African American accounts of slavery.