Board of Charity with medical advice as to the needs of white and colored persons desiring aid.  In 1856 he removed to Chatham, Canada, where he practiced medicine a number of years.  Doctor Delany thereafter like William Wells Brown, an occasional physician, devoted most of his time to the uplift of his people, traveling in America, Africa and England.  He became such a worker among his people that he was known as a leader rather than a physician.  He served in the Civil War as a commissioned officer of the United States Army, ranking as major.

Up to this point the colored physician had appeared as an occasional or exceptional individual, but hardly as forming a professional class.  Following the wake of the Civil War colleges and universities were planted in all parts of the South for the sake of preparing leaders for the newly emancipated race.  Several medical schools were established in connection with these institutions.  The rise of the Negro physician as a professional class may be dated from the establishment of these institutions.  The School of Medicine of Howard University, Washington, D.C., and the Meharry Medical College at Nashville, Tennessee, proved to be the strongest of these institutions and today are supplying the Negro medical profession with a large number of its annual recruits.

Dr. Charles B. Purvis, who was graduated from the Medical College of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1865, is perhaps the oldest colored physician in the United States; and by general consent ranks as dean of the fraternity.  He shared with Dr. A. T. Augusta the honor of being one of the few colored men to become surgeons in the United States Army.  Shortly after graduation he was made assistant surgeon in the Freedmen’s Hospital at Washington, D.C., with which institution he was connected during the entire period of his active professional life.  The development and present position of the medical school at Howard University is due to Dr. Purvis more than to any other single individual.  For several years he has been retired upon the Carnegie Foundation.  Dr. George W. Hubbard, a distinguished white physician, dean of the Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tennessee, has also been a great pioneer and promoter of the medical education of the Negro race.

At first, the Negro patient refused to put confidence in the physician of his own race, notwithstanding the closer intimacy of social contact.  It was not until after he had demonstrated his competency to treat disease as well as his white competitor that he was able to win recognition among his own people.  The colored physician is everywhere in open competition with the white practitioner, who never refuses to treat Negro patients, if allowed to assume the disdainful attitude of racial superiority.  If the Negro doctor did not secure practically as good results in the treatment of disease as the white physician, he would soon find himself without patients.