Who was Minnie Hogan Clemens?

In 1888, Minnie Hogan Clemens (Dorchester) became the first Black student to attend the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s Nurse Training School (HUP). Her admission was aided by the support of Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell, the first Black doctor to graduate from Penn’s Medical School in 1882. In the local news coverage at the time, Clemens’ acceptance into the program was widely celebrated by the Black community as a sign of progress for Black women, who had “no opportunities for employment in factories, stores or at trades, teaching or menial service alone being open to them.” After two years of training, during which time she “boarded at the Nurses’ Home and at the hospital, as necessity required,” Minnie completed her training with honors and Mossell later hired her to become the head of nursing at Frederick Douglass Hospital, the first Black hospital and nurse training school in Philadelphia (1895).

Despite admitting Black students into its programs in small numbers beginning in the 1880s, HUP balked at inviting Black doctors to complete their training in their hospital and limited the number of Black nurses and students. This kind of discrimination was commonplace in medicine and nursing throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a fact which fueled the growth of the Black hospital & nurse training school movement in cities around the country – an effort by Black communities to obtain entry into the growing healthcare professions while also improving their access to healthcare.

To learn more about the history of Philadelphia’s Black doctors and nurses, check out our exhibit, The Story of Philadelphia’s Black Hospitals and Nurse Training Schools, at Penn Libraries in Holman Biotech Commons, on view until March 29th.