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Mary Eliza Mahoney made nursing history on this day in 1879.

After graduating from the New England Hospital for Women and Children, she became the first professionally trained Black nurse in the United States.

She later helped co-found the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, creating more support and recognition for Black nurses.

This National Black Nurses Week, we honor her legacy and the doors she opened.

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In 1937, a hospital opened in St. Louis specifically to serve Black patients and train Black doctors and nurses at a time when most American medical institutions refused to admit or employ them at all.
Homer G. Phillips Hospital was named for a St. Louis attorney who spent years advocating for its creation, fighting for a facility that would provide genuine medical training opportunities to Black physicians and nurses systematically excluded from most other hospitals and medical schools across the country. Phillips was assassinated in 1931, years before the hospital that bears his name finally opened, but his advocacy directly led to the creation of one of the largest and most significant training hospitals for Black medical professionals in American history.
Over the following decades, Homer G. Phillips trained thousands of Black doctors, nurses, and interns, many of whom went on to practice throughout the country, at a time when such training and career opportunities were almost entirely unavailable elsewhere. The hospital closed as a full medical facility in 1979 amid broader changes in St. Louis’s healthcare system, but its legacy as a training ground for generations of Black medical professionals remains one of the most significant chapters in the city’s, and the nation’s, medical history.
Had you heard of Homer G. Phillips Hospital before today? Share your reaction in the comments, and follow Missouri Untold for more of the institutions that opened doors otherwise closed.