Eliza Ann Grier born enslaved in North Carolina earned her M.D., and in 1898 she became the first Black woman to practice medicine in Georgia. It took her 8-years to finish her bachelor’s degree in education from Fisk University in 1891 because she took every other year off to pick cotton and perform other work to earn her tuition to continue her studies.
Eliza Ann Grier was born enslaved in Mecklenburg, County North Carolina in 1864. Grier would later earn her M.D., becoming in 1898 the first African American woman to practice medicine in Georgia. In 1883, almost 20 years after her emancipation, Grier enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee with the goal of becoming a teacher. Grier earned a degree in education from the university eight years later in 1891. It took her so long because every other year off to pick cotton and perform other work to earn her tuition to continue her studies.
Not long before graduating from Fisk, Grier decided she wanted to become a medical doctor. Grier wrote to the Dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania requesting information about tuition and the possibility of pursuing advanced medical education. Grier indicated that she wished to become a medical doctor. Grier believed she could benefit her race more as a physician than as a teacher. She hoped for both admission and financial assistance. However, although she was admitted her but didn’t provide any help, prompting her to revert to the strategy she used while at Fisk, alternately working and studying for eight years until she completed her medical degree.
In 1897 after graduating from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Dr. Eliza Grier went to Atlanta, Georgia. In 1898 she wrote “I went to Philadelphia, studied medicine hard, procured my degree, and have come back to Atlanta where I have lived all my life, to practice my profession. Some of the best white doctors in the city have welcomed me and say that they will give me an even chance in the profession. That is all I ask.”
By 1899, however, Grier moved her practice to Greenville, South Carolina where she specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. In 1901 she got influenza and couldn’t see patients for six weeks. Facing the loss of her practice, Dr. Grier wrote a plea for financial assistance to Susan B. Anthony. The suffragist could not help her but sympathetically forwarded her request to the Woman’s Medical College. It is not known if the College provided help.
Later in 1901 Grier moved to Albany, Georgia but, after struggling for eight years to become a physician, Dr. Eliza Ann Grier died in 1902 at the age of 38 after only five years of medical practice. She was buried in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Sources:
Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the
Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_132.html
Diaz, S. (2007, July 03). Eliza Ann Grier (1864-1902). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/grier-eliza-ann-1902/
