These physicians, scientists, and health practitioners are remembered at The Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
MALAKU E. BAYEN (1900-1940)
Bayen, an Ethiopian physician, was educated in India and the United States, where he attended Howard University College of Medicine. In 1935 he returned to Ethiopia to serve at the American Mission Hospital. The following year, after Italy invaded Ethiopia, he returned to the United States as a special emissary of Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1937 he founded the Ethiopian World Federation in New York, which rallied Black Americans to Ethiopia’s cause.
GUNNING S. BEDFORD (1806-1870)
Bedford, an obstetrician and medical educator, was a founder of the medical college at New York University. In 1841 he became its first director of obstetrics and diseases of women and childbirth, a position he held until 1864. He opened the first obstetric clinic in the United States, for women too poor to pay a doctor. Through clinical teaching and widely circulated books, including Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of Women and Children and The Principles and Practice of Obstetrics, he trained physicians in the care of women and children. He taught during the formative period of American obstetrics and gynecology, when hospital experience and bedside instruction were becoming more important parts of medical training.
ALBERT ELLIS (1913-2007)
Ellis, a psychologist, reshaped modern psychotherapy. Holding a doctorate in clinical psychology from Columbia University, he broke with traditional psychoanalysis in the early 1950s to develop Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, known as REBT. Its central insight is that people are disturbed less by events themselves than by the beliefs they hold about them, and it teaches unconditional acceptance of oneself, of others, and of life. His approach became a cornerstone of the cognitive-behavioral movement, and Ellis is widely regarded as the first of its founders. He established the Albert Ellis Institute in New York, wrote more than 80 books and hundreds of articles, and was famous for his blunt, provocative style. A 1982 survey of American and Canadian psychologists ranked him the second most influential psychotherapist, behind Carl Rogers and ahead of Sigmund Freud. In 2001, Psychology Today wrote that no individual, not even Freud, had had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.”
RUDOLPH FISHER (1897-1934)
Fisher lived two lives at once. A physician who specialized in radiology, he ran his own X-ray practice while becoming one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance. His short stories, among them “The City of Refuge,” and his novels The Walls of Jericho and The Conjure-Man Dies captured Harlem life with sharp wit and warmth. The Conjure-Man Dies, published in 1932, was the first mystery novel by a Black writer to feature a Black detective and an entirely Black cast of characters. Fisher was also an accomplished musician who arranged songs for the concert stage. He died in 1934 at the age of thirty-seven.
CHRISTIAN ARCHIBALD HERTER (1865-1910)
Herter brought laboratory science to the study of disease. A physician and pathologist with a particular interest in the gastrointestinal tract, he investigated the relationship between digestion, intestinal bacteria, and illness. In 1905 he and John Jacob Abel founded the Journal of Biological Chemistry, an important forum for the growing field of biochemistry. Herter was also an original trustee of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and helped establish the Harvey Society in New York. His research, his financial support, and the institutions he helped build strengthened medical research in the United States.
HERMAN KNAPP (1832-1911)
Knapp is regarded as the founder of modern American ophthalmology. Born and trained in Germany, he moved to New York in 1868 and founded the New York Ophthalmic and Aural Institute, a hospital for diseases of the eyes and ears. He later became professor of ophthalmology at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. With Salomon Moos he founded the Archives of Ophthalmology and Otology, a journal that later divided into separate publications. Knapp also developed surgical instruments and contributed to the understanding of eye disease and vision. His son and grandson continued the family’s work in ophthalmology.
JAMES ROSEBRUGH LEAMING (1820-1892)
Leaming was one of the leading authorities on diseases of the heart and lungs in nineteenth-century America. Born in Groveland, New York, in 1820, he earned his medical degree in 1849 from the University of the City of New York, now New York University, and built a distinguished career in New York City as a physician, teacher, and writer. His early lectures on pleural pathology and the origins of respiratory sounds met fierce resistance from the medical establishment, yet he lived to see his ideas widely accepted. He wrote and taught on the diagnosis of heart and lung disease and published extensively in the New York Journal of Medicine and the Transactions of the New York Academy of Medicine.
LEO CECIL MAITLAND (1928-1992)
Maitland, a physician and surgeon, was a member of the surgical team that saved Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after King was stabbed at a book signing in Harlem in 1958. He received his medical education at Meharry Medical College and continued his surgical training at New York University. He also cared for prominent artists and entertainers, including Geoffrey Holder and Miles Davis. That practice earned him the description “Doctor to the Stars.”
JOSIAH CALVIN McCRACKEN (1874-1962)
McCracken devoted much of his medical career to training physicians and caring for patients in China. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, he spent thirty-six years in medical missionary work and, as dean of the medical school at St. John’s University in Shanghai, helped develop medical education in that city. He continued to support the school’s students and graduates after his retirement. Before he went to China, McCracken was an accomplished college athlete and won two medals at the 1900 Olympics in Paris, a silver in the shot put and a bronze in the hammer throw.
DAVID KEARNY McDONOGH (1821-1893)
Born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation, McDonogh became America’s first African American ophthalmology specialist. Sent north to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania in 1838, he became the college’s first African American graduate in 1844. He pursued medicine against the wishes of the man who had enslaved him and completed his studies in 1847 at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, later part of Columbia University, which refused to grant him a diploma. He practiced for more than forty years, serving on the staff of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and running a private practice in Greenwich Village, and he stood with Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist cause. In 1875 he received a medical degree from the Eclectic Medical College of New York, where he also taught. In 1898, five years after his death, physicians founded the McDonough Memorial Hospital (the hospital’s spelling) in his honor, one of New York’s first hospitals to serve patients and employ doctors of every race. In 2018 Columbia University posthumously awarded him the degree it had denied him in 1847.
GEORGE ALEXANDER McGUIRE (1866-1934)
McGuire pursued both medicine and ministry. He earned his medical degree in 1910 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston and worked as a physician and clergyman in the United States and the West Indies. He is best known as the founder and first patriarch of the African Orthodox Church. His association with Marcus Garvey and his commitment to an independent Black church helped shape that institution, and in 1921 he was consecrated its first bishop and primate.
HIDEYO NOGUCHI (1876-1928)
Noguchi rose from poverty in rural Japan to international renown as a bacteriologist. A severe childhood burn left his left hand deformed, yet he trained as a physician and emigrated to the United States in 1900. At the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research he became known for identifying the microorganism that causes syphilis in the brains of patients suffering paralytic disease. He published more than two hundred papers on infectious diseases ranging from trachoma to Oroya fever. Some of his findings were later disproved, including his claim that yellow fever was caused by a bacterium. In 1928, while investigating yellow fever in West Africa, he contracted the disease and died in Accra. His body was returned to New York and buried with honors at Woodlawn. He remains a national hero in Japan, where his portrait appeared on the 1,000-yen note issued from 2004 to 2024.
CHARLES NORRIS (1867-1935)
Norris transformed how a great city investigates death. Trained at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and in the laboratories of Europe, he became the first appointed Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York in 1918, after the legislature abolished the coroner system. He built a rigorous, science-based approach to investigating deaths and founded the nation’s first forensic toxicology laboratory. With the chemist Alexander Gettler, he helped establish the scientific foundations of modern forensic toxicology. His office turned suspicious deaths into questions of hard evidence and repeatedly overturned false conclusions. Norris served until his death in 1935. His career is at the center of Deborah Blum’s history The Poisoner’s Handbook.
IDA P. ROLF (1896-1979)
Rolf trained as a biochemist, earning a Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Columbia University in 1920, and later developed the system of bodywork known as Rolfing Structural Integration. Her approach, a distinct form of alternative bodywork, focused on the relationship between posture, connective tissue, movement, and gravity. In 1971 she founded the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration in Boulder, Colorado, to teach the method, and she trained practitioners who continued her work.
JOKICHI TAKAMINE (1854-1922)
Takamine isolated adrenaline in 1901, the first hormone obtained in pure form. Born in Japan, he built a career that joined scientific research with industrial production. His work on adrenaline and on Taka-Diastase, an enzyme preparation used to aid digestion, established his reputation as a pharmaceutical innovator. A chemist rather than a practicing physician, he helped turn laboratory discoveries into products that could be manufactured and used in medical care. He also helped organize and fund the 1912 gift of Japanese cherry trees to Washington, D.C.