The Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School began in a Philadelphia house with fifteen beds. Nathan Francis Mossell helped found it in 1895 to care for Black patients, offer internships to Black doctors and train Black women as nurses. The institution was the first Black private hospital in Philadelphia, and former Penn professors were among its early donors. His wife, writer Gertrude Bustill Mossell, raised money for the hospital.
Mossell had worked in his father's brickyard before studying at Lincoln University. In 1882, he became the first African American to earn a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, taking second honors in his class. He trained under surgeon D. Hayes Agnew in Penn's outpatient surgical clinic, then traveled to London for internships at Guy's, Queen's College and St. Thomas's hospitals, because the internships American hospitals denied him were available across the Atlantic. Back in Philadelphia, he won election to the Philadelphia County Medical Society in 1888 after overcoming significant opposition on the basis of his race. Philadelphia's hospitals, like most American teaching institutions of the era, admitted few Black physicians and trained almost none of the Black women who wanted to nurse, which is what made a Black-run hospital with its own training school worth building.
He led Douglass Hospital as chief of staff and medical director for more than thirty-five years, retiring in 1933. In 1948, two years after his death, the hospital merged with Mercy Hospital to form Mercy-Douglass, which continued caring for Black Philadelphians until it closed in 1973. He also helped found Philadelphia's NAACP branch in 1910. Mossell continued his private medical practice until shortly before his death in 1946.
His marriage joined a family of Philadelphia firsts. He had met Gertrude Bustill at Lincoln University; she became a professional writer and editor who published books and worked for Philadelphia's Press, Times and Inquirer, and she raised money for the hospital and helped establish the Southwest branch of the YWCA. His brother Aaron Albert Mossell became the first African American graduate of Penn's Law School, and his niece Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander became, in 1921, the first Black person to earn a doctorate in economics in the United States.
Penn's own archives describe him as the most prominent of the university's first African American students, and the hospital he built carried his work past his death, serving Philadelphia's Black community for decades after the fifteen-bed house closed.
