This Day in History: 1846-03-16

Physician, organization founder, and social reformer Rebecca J. Cole is born. In 1867, she became the second African-American woman to become a doctor in the United States (after Rebecca Lee Crumpler’s achievement three years earlier). Throughout her life, Dr Cole overcame racial and gender barriers to medical education by training in all-female institutions run by women who had been part of the first generation of female physicians graduating mid-century. Learn more.