Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first African American woman to earn a doctor of medicine degree in the United States, yet she was buried in an unmarked grave for 125 years. This deep dive reconstructs her journey and the mechanics of how she practiced medicine in a hostile society.

From learning community healing from her aunt to leveraging nursing recommendations into admission at the New England Female Medical College, Crumpler forced open locked institutional doors. We follow her work with the Freedmen's Bureau in Richmond and her pioneering book on preventative care.

• How she used physicians' letters to overcome academic gatekeeping in 1864
• Her dangerous move to war-ruined Richmond to treat newly freed people
• Circumventing hostile pharmacists through sanitation and preventative medicine
• Her 1883 Bo ...