On September 5, 1906, Sydney Borden Scott went back to school. He’d already graduated twice from Atlanta Baptist College, now Morehouse, in 1898 and 1901, then briefly spent time on the other side of the desk, as a principal and 3rd and 4th grade teacher at the East Athens School for “colored” children in East Athens, GA. Now, after a bit of time with the Isthmian (Panama) Canal Commission, he was hitting the books again. His goal: to become a doctor.
Listing for Meharry Medical College. American Medical Directory, 1906. Credit below.
Borden was nowhere near the first African American to want to become a doctor, or to successfully achieve that goal. Black men and women had been engaged in healthcare and medicine from the earliest days of the nation (and had brought medical knowledge and traditions with them from Africa), even as slavery and racism had mostly kept them from holding formal titles that were respected outside the Black community. But that history didn’t necessarily make his path easier. In his book The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, historian Donald Lee Grant writes,
"Black professionals faced a double-barreled racism. Seldom would a white call on a black doctor or lawyer for services and many blacks did not trust them, believing they were less well-trained and competent than white. A few blacks were able to obtain the education necessary to enter the health services. There were 27 black doctors in Georgia in 1891, 65 in 1905, 146 in 1915, and 193 in 1930. They were barred from white medical associations and from practicing in all but a few hospitals.”
This “double-barreled racism” wasn’t necessarily universal. Many Black physicians were highly respected in their communities, both because of their formal educations and because of their service to their communities, and they were often turned to as, or assumed the role of, community leaders. But, first, one had to actually become a doctor.
Picking A School
When Borden decided to return to school to become a doctor, he could have tried to gain admission to one of the predominantly white medical schools in the U.S., which were generally reluctant to admit African Americans, he could have traveled abroad for an education, which might have cost a pretty penny, or he could have set his sights on one of the schools specifically created to serve Black students. At the time, there were about eight: Howard University College of Medicine (Washington, DC), Leonard Medical School at Shaw University (Raleigh, NC), Louisville National Medical College (Kentucky), Flint Medical College (New Orleans, LA), University of West Tennessee College of Medicine and Surgery (Memphis, TN), Meharry Medical College of Walden University (Nashville, TN), and Knoxville Medical College (Tennessee). Borden took the latter route, and ultimately selected Meharry in Nashville.
Why Meharry? Perhaps he’d heard that Dr. Daniel Hale Williams – one of the first doctors to perform successful open heart surgery – regularly taught guest classes there.
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| The Colored American (Washington, DC). 10 January 1903. Credit Below. |
Maybe he’d seen advertisements like the below in a newspaper, and found them enticing.
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| Two advertisements for Walden University and Meharry Medical School, published in The Nashville Globe, 6 September, 1907. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064259/1907-09-06/ed-1/seq-2/>. |
Maybe it was the power of word of mouth, and the reputation Meharry had built. One report, tasked with exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the American and Canadian medical training systems, and researched at Meharry in the year after Borden’s graduation, wrote:
“Of the seven medical schools for negroes in the United States, five are at this moment in no position to make any contribution of value to the solution of the problem above pointed out: Flint at New Orleans, Leonard at Raleigh, the Knoxville, Memphis, and Louisville schools are ineffectual. They are wasting small sums annually and sending out undisciplined men, whose lack of real training is covered up by the imposing M.D. degree…Meharry at Nashville and Howard at Washington are worth developing, and until considerably increased benefactions are available, effort will wisely concentrate upon them.”
Later, the report continues, “The urgent need in respect to the medical education of the negro is concentration of resources slender at best on a single southern institution. Much the most favorably situated for this purpose is Meharry Medical College at Nashville.”
It is really important to note that this report, known as the Flexner Report and published by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910, had a devastating impact on Black medical schools; within just over a decade, every Black medical school except Howard and Meharry had shut down due to lack of funds and support. Yet his statements about Meharry’s promise echoed – if weakly - something that mentions in the Black press had implied for years: that Meharry produced respected and respectable doctors who served their communities well.
About Meharry
When Borden arrived at Meharry Medical College in 1906, he was about 26 years old. The school itself was barely older, having been founded in 1876 as the Meharry Medical Department of Central Tennessee College, now Walden University, in Nashville. Like Atlanta Baptist College, Central Tennessee had been founded for the education of newly emancipated African Americans as the Civil War came to a close, and was supported with the help of charitable organizations. In this case, it was the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and with a generous donation from Samuel Meharry and his four brothers in gratitude for a years earlier good deed done Samuel by a Black man, a building was constructed for the first medical school for African Americans in the South.
If you look at this segment of a Nashville map from 1908, you can see a Freedman’s Aid & Educational Society building located next to Central Tennessee’s campus, and Meharry at the other end:
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| Partial Map of Nashville, 1908. Courtesy of the Metro Nashville Archives. Full Credit Below. |
You can start to imagine the campus as Borden would have seen it through descriptions in the 1905-1906 Catalogue / 1906-1907 Announcements, which listed Borden as a Freshman (for the 1906-1907 schoolyear).
“The buildings are located at the corner of Maple and Chestnut streets, and on the line of the City Electric Railroad. The main building is constructed of brick, is forty feet wide, and sixty feet in length, and four stories in height, including the basement…
…The ground floor is used as laboratories for practical work in chemistry; the second story for office, museum and dwelling apartments; the third floor contains a lecture room of sufficient size to accommodate one hundred students, recitation room and cabinet of materia medica; the fourth story is fitted for lecture room…
The new Meharry Auditorium is located on a lot north of Meharry Medical College and fronting on Maple Street [with] pressed brick with stone trimmings in front.”
The auditorium building contained a basement laboratory, an auditorium to seat 1000, a lecture and examination room, an “Electrical and Physiological Laboratory,” and “a museum for Anatomical, Pathological and Natural History specimens.”
Here’s one view of the main building, published in 1895:
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| Meharry Medical College, Credit Below. |
…and another from a 1908 edition of The Nashville Globe:
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| Meharry Medical College. Credit Below. |
He would have recognized this building and walked through its doors many times.
Getting In
Like other hopeful entrants at member schools of the Association of American Medical Colleges, Borden had to meet certain criteria. He needed:
- “A bachelor’s degree from an approved college or university.”
- “A diploma from an accredited high school, normal school or academy” demonstrating completion of at least 2 years of a foreign language (including Latin), 2 years each of math, English, laboratory science, 1 year of history, and 6 years of additional study in “language, literature, history or science.”
- Passing exams in English, math, language, history, and science, though a certificate from a “reputable instructor…recognized by the superintendents…or any State Board of Medical Examiners” were acceptable in place of those exams.
- “A certificate of good moral character from two reputable physicians or citizens of the State in which [he resided.”
And because of the school’s religious foundation, he and all other students would have needed to “pledge…to abstain from the use of all intoxicating liquors, as a beverage, while attending the University…, attend morning prayers at the College Chapel, religious services on the Sabbath, and monthly prayer meetings.” Additionally, he could use “no tobacco on college grounds” nor “visit the theater or other questionable places of amusement.” Borden would have been familiar with these types of rules – and perhaps how to get around them! – since similar ones were in place at Atlanta Baptist College during his time there just a few years earlier.
Student Life
The standard program of study at Meharry lasted four years, seven months each, and included a mixture of lectures, recitations, and hands-on experiences, via lab and clinic work. A First Year student could be expected to take “Anatomy, Chemistry, and Physiology, and work two hours a day in the Chemical Laboratory for ten weeks” plus do “Physiological Laboratory work” and study “Elements of Botany; Histology; [and] Embryology.”
By their Fourth Year, students were studying “Surgery, Obstetrics, Diseases of the Genito-Urinary Organs, Bacteriology, Dermatology, Gynæcology, Practice of Medicine, Medical Ethics, Electro-Therapeutics, Mental Diseases, Ophthalmology, Otology, Laryngology, Dissecting, and Review of Anatomy.” Whew!
Students also observed or participated in procedures at Mercy Hospital, a 23-bed hospital managed by Meharry at which many noted Black doctors performed surgeries as guests or staff.
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| Mercy Hospital, affiliated with Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN. Credit Below. |
Borden and his classmates were clearly kept busy, and had a lot (!) to learn. But they still found time for fun. Among other activities, they maintained a football team, a band, and a musical quartette, and students were involved in a variety of social events. So what about Borden - did he have time for fun? I’ll pick that up in my next post!
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Do you know anything about Borden's time at Meharry? Drop a note in the comments - I'd love to hear from you!
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Credits Not Listed Above
1. Meharry Medical College listing, in 1906 American Medical Directory: Accessed via accessed via Hathi Trust: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924096394378?urlappend=%3Bseq=932.
2. Article on Dr. Daniel Hale Williams in The Colored American: Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/sn83027091/1903-01-10/ed-1/.
3. Map Showing Meharry: Atlas of the City of Nashville, 1908, Plate 22A and 22B. Courtesy of the Metro Nashville Archives, accessed via the Nashville Public Library: https://digital.library.nashville.org/digital/collection/nr/search.
4. Sketch of Meharry Medical College: The Afro-American Encyclopedia, or, The Thoughts, doings, and sayings of the race..., published in 1895, p. 319. Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/25822752.4742.emory.edu/page/n319/mode/2up.
5. Photographs of Meharry Medical College and Mercy Hospital: The Nashville Globe, 04 Sept. 1908. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064259/1908-09-04/ed-1/seq-17/>.
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