Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler
This Article was printed in Outlook by the Bay in March; however, my copy never arrived. Recent newspaper reports indicate that the mail in Virginia has deteriorated, so I blame it on that. Here is a copy of the article as I sent it to the OBTB editors.
Richmond, Virginia, was a wreck at the end of the American Civil War. War had raged all around and culminated with a nine-month siege of the city of Petersburg with a strangling effect on Richmond's battered economy. Horses commonly seen in more fortunate cities were scarce in Richmond. The war had taken most of them. The city had experienced a bread riot when hungry residents, primarily women with children, rampaged through the city. About ten percent of the town had burned down when, in April of 1865, Confederate soldiers lit fires to burn up supplies as the Confederate government escaped, and the Union army moved in and eventually put out the flames. There were shortages of everything, and inflation was rampant.
In this environment, a young woman from Boston arrived with her second husband and her medical degree. Not only was Rebecca Lee Crumpler one of only three hundred female doctors in the United States, but she was also the first and only African American woman to hold such a degree. It was the deprivation caused by the war that drove her to Richmond. The city was, as she described later, "The proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children." She was a devoted Baptist.
There could not be two cities more different than Boston, Massachusetts, and Richmond, Virginia, in 1865. Boston was the hotbed of the abolition movement, and supporters of that movement made it possible for Rebecca Crumpler to get a scholarship to the New England Female Medical College. Richmond was the fallen capital of the Confederacy, a vanquished government committed to the longevity of slavery.
Richmond was hostile to its African American citizens in the years immediately following the war. The Freedman's Bureau records show numerous occurrences of the arrest of black men for no other reason than not having a pass. In the summer of 1865, the same year the Crumplers arrived in the city, four black citizens got out of the way of two approaching Confederate veterans. Whites physically attacked them for not getting completely off the sidewalk and standing in the street until the white men passed by.
During the four years she spent in Richmond, Dr. Crumpler not only had this kind of conduct to be wary of, but she also faced inappropriate, discriminatory behavior toward her because she was a woman. Male doctors refused to work with her, and pharmacists refused to fill her prescriptions. And yet Dr. Crumpler continued to work for the medical division of the Freedman's Bureau, administering to sick and hurt indigents.
Returning to Boston in 1869, she continued practicing medicine for a while and then wrote. "A Book of Medical Discourses." Dr. Crumpler wrote about her life in the book's introduction.
Both her husbands were from Virginia. Her first husband, Wyatt Lee, was from Prince George County, and historians assume he escaped slavery and made his way to Boston. He was thirty years old when he married Rebecca in 1852. Wyatt Lee died in 1863 of pulmonary tuberculosis, and his wife interrupted her medical studies to attend to him. Rebecca married Arthur Crumpler, who managed to escape his life as an enslaved person in Southampton County by finding refuge on a United States Navy gunboat. The couple married on May 24, 1865, before moving to Richmond.
Her book focused on preventative care and advice to women about taking care of children's health. The doctor's concern was the infant mortality that mothers with the proper knowledge could prevent. Most of what she wrote about is still relevant today.
ALetter to the Editor about Letters to the Editor
I penned this to the Richmond Times Dispatched after reading them whine about not enough letters. Obviously, they did not print this one.
RE: RTD wants your letters 3/30/2024
Like Glenwood Burley, I enjoy reading Letters to the Editor and occasionally submitting one of my own. I agree that they provide a glimpse of what is on the community's mind, and sometimes, they can be pretty insightful and thought-provoking. But the shortage of such letters is not a failing of the newspaper readership alone.
Consider that the Lee Enterprise Newspapers, such as the Richmond Times Dispatch and the Roanoke Times, have drastically cut the space they allocate for Letters to the Editor. At least once a week, the entire Opinion page is taken up by two opposing essays written by some "experts" and a giant political cartoon that appears to be there for the sole purpose of gobbling up space that could be used for letters.
By contrast, the Virginian-Pilot and other Tribune newspapers, like the Chicago Tribune, print letters daily. In 2023, I sent the Virginian-Pilot eight letters, and six were accepted. I sent more to the Richmond Times Dispatch because I live in this city. Of the eleven I submitted to RTD, only one appeared in the paper that year. The article suggests that if readers want to read more letters, they should write more. I suggest that if the editors of the Richmond Times Dispatch want to receive more letters, it should print more.
There is something so serendipitous about a cartoon pulled from a major newspaper network when the content of said cartoon references a part of the Civil War history omitted by historians to benefit the Southern ideology called the Lost Cause. So, when Gannett newspapers pulled a Doonesbury cartoon, all kinds of insinuations about censorial conspiracies hit social media. Read More
Published in 101 Words
The challenge in 101 Words is to produce a complete story in exactly that number of words, no more no less. Its editors accepted this piece, which recieved some nice compliments from fellow writers. PETE'S LIFE LEAF
Published in The Bookends Review
Major Tom Briggs liked the jungle of the Philippines. He was comfortable in his sweat-soaked uniform. The earthliness of the jungle’s petrichor and the sounds of its exotic creatures enchanted him. Briggs liked the Filipinos who tolerated his high school-level Spanish and taught him local dialects. He felt at home among them and in the jungle of the American-owned archipelago. So, when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded, the tall, blonde-haired, lanky army officer and several of his men escaped into the torrid jungle rather than participate in the Bataan Death March.
Read the whole story :Tom Briggs
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