Nathan Francis Mossell

Nathan Francis Mossell (July 27, 1856 – October 27, 1946) was an American physician who was the first African-American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1882. He did post-graduate training at hospitals in Philadelphia and London. In 1888, he was the first black physician elected as member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society in Pennsylvania. He was active in the NAACP and also helped found the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School in West Philadelphia in 1895, which he led as chief-of-staff and medical director until he retired in 1933. Gertrude Bustill Mossell was his wife.

Early life and education Mossell was born in Hamilton, Canada, in 1856, the fourth of nine children. Both his parents, Eliza Bowers (1824 – 1878) and Aaron Albert Mossell I (1824 – 1910), were descended from freed slaves. According to Mossell's autobiography, his mother's stories of the discrimination and hardship their families faced strengthened her own children's determination to succeed. Mossell's maternal grandfather had resisted all attempts by his owner to make him work and was eventually freed. He married and settled in Baltimore, but the entire family, including Mossell's mother, who was a child at the time, were deported to Trinidad. Mossell's paternal grandfather, who had been transported from the coast of West Africa, managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife. He too settled in Baltimore, where Mossell's father was born.

Mossell's siblings were the following:

During the Civil War, the family moved back to the United States, settling in Lockport, New York, where Mossell's father again owned his own brickmaking business. Along with his siblings, Mossell attended the local public school in Lockport. His schooling became erratic once he started working part-time at age nine for his father. He eventually joined his elder brother Charles at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, where he studied Natural Science, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1879.

Later life and medical career

Mossell went on to study at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (PENN). He earned his medical degree in 1882. He was PENN's first African-American medical school graduate. He was believed to be the oldest practicing black physician at the time of his death.