"May Edward Chinn" (April 1896-December 1,1980)

Was an African-American woman physician.She was the first African-American woman to

graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College and the first African-American woman to intern at Harlem Hospital.In her private practice,she provided care for patients who would not otherwise received treatment.May was a strong advocate of early cancer screening.May was born in Great Barrington Massachusetts.Her father,William Lafayette,was the son of a plantation slave and her owner,at the age of 11,he escaped from this Virginia plantation.Her mother Lulu Ann,was the daughter of a slave and a chickahominy Native America.Lulu worked as the live-in cook at the Long Island mansion of the Tiffany family jewelers,who treated May as a family member.Growing up,she attended musical concerts in New York City and learned to play piano,accompany the singer Paul Robeson in the early 1920s.The family also taught her the German and French languages.May mother,who valued education,saved enough money from cooking to send her to the Bordentown Manual Training Industrial School,a New Jersey boarding school,until May contacted osteomyelitis of the jaw.May remained in New York after her surgery there,she also too poor to finish high school.Despite her lack of diploma,she took the entrance examination to Columbia Teachers College and passed it,matriculating in 1917.May studied her first love,music,until,until a professor mocked her race as unfit for playing classical music.At the same time,she received high praise for a scientific paper she wrote on sewage disposal,so she changed her major to science.In her senior year,May secured a full-time position as a lab technician in clinical pathology,so she completed her course work at night to graduate with a bachelor's degree in science 1921.May proceeded to study medicine at Bellevue Medical College,becoming its first African-American woman to graduate in 1926.Rockefeller Institute was prepared to offer May a research fellowship until learned of her race.Harlem Hospital was the only medical institution in the city that offered her an internship.May was the first African-American woman to intern there and to accompany paramedics on ambulances calls,she confronted another obstacle when the hospital refused her practicing privileges there.May established a private practice instead,seeing patients in her office and performing procedures in their homes.This experience prompted her to earn a master's degree in public health from Columbia University in 1933.Upon graduating May found no hospital would allow her practicing privileges.With her fair skin and last name,many assumed that she was White or Chinese.May later Told Muriel Petioni,former president of the society of Black Women Physicians,that black workers snubbed her because they assumed she was passing as white,and did not want to jeopardize her position.In 1940,Harlem Hospital granted May admitting privileges,in part due to mayor Fiorello La Guardia's integration in the wake of the Harlem Riot of 1935.In 1944,the Strang Clinic hired May to conduct research on cancer,and she remained there for the next 29 years.The society of Surgical Oncology invited her to become a member,and in 1975,she established a society to promote African-American women to attend medical school.May maintained her private practice until the age of 81.While attending a reception at Columbia University in honor of a friend,she collapsed and died.