The first real impetus to bring Negroes in considerable numbers into the professional world came from the American Colonization Society, which in the early years flourished in the South as well as in the North.  This organization hoped to return the free Negroes to Africa and undertook to prepare professional leaders of their race for the Liberian colony.  “To execute this scheme, leaders of the colonization movement endeavored to educate Negroes in mechanic arts, agriculture, science and Biblical literature.  Exceptionally bright youths were to be given special training as catechists, teachers, preachers and physicians.  Not much was said about what they were doing, but now and then appeared notices of Negroes who had been prepared privately in the South or publicly in the North for service in Liberia.  Dr. William Taylor and Dr. Fleet were thus educated in the District of Columbia.  In the same way John V. DeGrasse, of New York, and Thomas J. White, of Brooklyn, were allowed to complete the medical course at Bowdoin in 1849.  In 1854 Dr. DeGrasse was admitted as a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.  In 1858 the Berkshire Medical School graduated two colored doctors who were gratuitously educated by the American Educational Society."[6] Dr. A. T. Augusta studied medicine at the University of Toronto.  He qualified by competitive examination and obtained the position of surgeon in the United States Army, being the first Negro to hold such a position.  After the war he became one of the leading colored physicians in the District of Columbia.  Prior to 1861 Negroes had taken courses at the Medical School of the University of New York; Caselton Medical School in Vermont; Berkshire Medical School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; the Rush Medical School in Chicago; the Eclectic Medical School in Philadelphia; the Homeopathic College of Cleveland; and the Medical School of Harvard University.

The next colored physician of prominence was Martin R. Delany.  Delany grew to manhood in Pittsburgh, where early in his career he began the study of medicine, but abandoned it for pursuits in other parts.  In 1849 he returned to that city and resumed his studies under Doctors Joseph P. Gazzan and Francis J. Lemoyne, who secured for him admission to the medical department of Harvard College after he had been refused by the University Pennsylvania, Jefferson College, and the medical colleges of Albany and Geneva, New York.  After leaving Harvard, he, like Dr. Smith, became interested in the discussion of the superiority and inferiority of races, and traveled extensively through the West, lecturing with some success on the physiological aspect of these subjects.  He then returned to Pittsburgh, where he became a practitioner and distinguished himself in treating the cholera during the epidemic of 1854.  About this time his worth to the community was attested by his appointment as a member of the Subcommittee of Referees who furnished the Municipal