Joseph Lealand Johnson was the second African American to earn both a Ph.D. and an M.D. degree. Although his parents had been born into slavery in North Carolina, Johnson was able to secure an education and eventually became dean of the Howard University Medical School and chairman of its Department of Physiology. It was through his efforts that this department became a fully modernized place of research.

Johnson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 14, 1895. His parents had moved there from North Carolina and eventually had fourteen children. Johnson was the youngest of the ten that survived infancy. His father was a laborer who died when Johnson was two, and his mother supported the family as a midwife. Although the ten-year-old Johnson was so interested in the law that he would regularly cut school to attend trials at City Hall, he took the advice of his...