Myra Adele Logan

Myra Adele Logan (1908 – January 13, 1977) is known as the first African American female physician, surgeon, and anatomist to perform a successful open-heart surgery. Following this accomplishment, Logan focused her work on children's heart surgery and was involved in the development of the antibiotic Aureomycin which treated bacterial, viral, and rickettsial diseases with the majority of her medical practice done at the Harlem Hospital in New York. Logan attended medical school during the pre–Civil Rights era. The majority of black female physicians in this time period were forced to attend segregated schools.

Logan also worked with the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, and the New York State Commission on Discrimination.

Personal life Early life and education Myra Adele Logan was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1908, to Warren and Adella Hunt Logan. She was the youngest of eight children and sister to Arthur R. Logan. After graduating with honors from Tuskegee High School, she attended a historically black college, Atlanta University, and graduated as valedictorian of her class in 1927. She moved to New York and attended Columbia University, where she earned her MS in psychology. She worked for the YWCA in Connecticut for some years before opting for a career in medicine. Logan won the first four-year $10,000 Walter Gray Crump Scholarship that was exclusively for aiding African-American medical students to attend New York Medical College. She graduated from medical school in 1933. She was the second female African American intern at Harlem Hospital in New York and did her surgery residency there.

While working at Harlem Hospital, Logan met painter Charles Alston, they married on April 8, 1944. The project was intended to combine the fact of there being a lack of African American physicians during this time with the maternal gender role placed on women as well. Alston included her alongside Dr. Louis Wright who was the first African American physician at Harlem Hospital and Louis Pasteur in this work, showcasing the advancement of Western medicine with African American and Caucasian healthcare professionals working side by side.

That mural has been restored and can be viewed at the Harlem Hospital Gallery.

Later life Outside of her career, Logan was a renowned classical pianist. After her retirement in 1970 and later served on the New York State Workmen's Compensation Board. On January 13, 1977, Logan died of lung cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital at the age of 68. She was also a visiting surgeon at the Sydenham Hospital, and did all this while maintaining her own private practice. In 1943, Logan became the first woman to perform bypass surgery, an open-heart surgical procedure, which was the ninth of its kind in the world. This was when she began dedicating her career towards children's heart surgery alongside developing the antibiotic Aureomycin. Logan published these results in the Archives of Surgery and the Journal of American Medical Surgery; she also published results for her research with Puromycin in multiple journals and archives. She also worked with fellow Harlem Hospital physician, Dr. Louis T. Wright, on antibiotic research.

In 1970, upon retiring, she served on the New York State Workmen's Compensation Board. thumb Myra Logan with colleagues at patient bedside, Harlem Hospital, New York. From left to right: Lyndon M. Hill, Louis T. Wright, Myra Logan, Aaron Prigot, unidentified African-American woman patient, and unidentified hospital employee.