Meharry Medical College
Tennessee
Just north of downtown Nashville sits Meharry Medical College, one of the most consequential institutions in American medical history. Founded in eighteen seventy-six as the Medical Department of Central Tennessee College, Meharry was created by the Methodist Episcopal Church's Freedman's Aid Society with a singular mission: to train Black physicians and dentists at a moment when the nation's medical schools were almost entirely closed to African Americans.
The name honors Samuel Meharry, a Scots-Irish salt trader who, according to tradition, was once rescued from a muddy road in Kentucky by a formerly enslaved family. He vowed to repay that act of kindness and later donated fifteen thousand dollars to help launch the school. That gift, combined with the labor of George Whipple Hubbard, a Union Army veteran who earned his own medical degree and then dedicated his life to educating Black doctors, gave rise to an institution that would reshape American medicine.
During Meharry's first ninety years of operation, the college trained more Black physicians and dentists than any other institution in the nation. At its peak in the early twentieth century, roughly half of all Black doctors and dentists practicing in the United States had earned their degrees here. This was not a footnote. It was the difference between Black communities having access to medical care and going without it entirely, in a country where segregated hospitals routinely turned away Black patients from white facilities.
Meharry was officially chartered as a freestanding institution in nineteen fifteen. Over the following decades it added schools of dentistry, nursing, and graduate studies. Today it remains the largest private historically Black institution in the United States solely dedicated to health sciences education. About sixty percent of its graduates become primary care physicians, and roughly three quarters of them go on to practice in medically underserved communities. The work that began with nine students in eighteen seventy-six continues to close one of the most stubborn gaps in American public health.
