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Sarah Loguen Fraser was a pioneering Black American physician specializing in pediatrics, who also became the first female Doctor in the Dominican Republic while she was living there with her husband.
“I will never, never see a human being in need of aid again and not be able to help.” — Sarah Loguen Fraser, M.D.
She was born in Syracuse, New York, as Marinda Sarah Loguen, the daughter of Caroline Storum and the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Both parents were lifelong activists in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and they established their family home as a "station" (safe house) in the underground railroad, harboring some 1,500 African Americans who passed through Syracuse en route to asylum in Canada during the decades preceding the Civil War. The U.S. Fugitive Slave Act, which criminalized any failure to report knowledge of the whereabouts of an escaped slave, became federal law the year of Sarah Loguen's birth. This posed new threats to the entire family and especially to Reverend Loguen, who had escaped from slavery in his youth.
Educated at the church school established by her father, Sarah Loguen gained practical medical experience during childhood by assisting in the care of fugitives, many of whom arrived at the Loguen house suffering from injuries or illnesses incurred in their escapes.
Denied access to mainstream medical institutions, the Loguens employed traditional Iroquois healing techniques taught to them by a circle of sympathetic Haudenosaunee women.
In an unpublished biography, Loguen is quoted as citing two related factors in motivating her to become a doctor: a sense of helplessness in witnessing the physical suffering of others and a desire to continue to work for the advancement of Black Americans after emancipation.
"To have those of my race come to me for help--and for me to be able to give it--will be all the Heaven I want," she said.
Loguen's hope for a formal medical education was realized after the establishment in 1870 of Syracuse University, one of the first institutions of higher learning to admit men and women of all races as students.
In preparation for the entrance exam, she was tutored in biology and chemistry by Michael Benedict, a prominent white physician who had been active in the underground railroad and served as a frontline Union surgeon in the Civil War.
Loguen graduated from the Syracuse University College of Medicine (now Upstate Medical University of the State University of New York [SUNY]) in 1876. She was the first woman to earn an M.D. degree from the school and is believed to be the fourth Black American woman to become a licensed physician in the United States.
In 1881, after serving internships in pediatric-obstetric medicine at the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia and the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, she moved to the home of her older sister, Amelia, in Washington, D.C., and went into private practice.
The eminent writer Frederick Douglass, Amelia's father-in-law and a longtime friend and political ally of the Loguen family, presented the young doctor with a "shingle" to hang in the window of her office.
With neither of Sarah's parents alive, Douglass took it upon himself to find her a suitable husband. To that end, he arranged an exchange of letters with Dr. Charles Fraser, a well-to-do pharmacist and plantation owner who lived in Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic.
Fraser, who was of Afro-Caribbean and Danish descent, came to the United States, and following a brief courtship, the couple married in Syracuse in 1882, sailing from New York to Puerto Plata a week after their wedding. They had one child.
With no previous knowledge of Spanish, Loguen studied the language and passed the requisite certification exam at the University of Santo Domingo in 1884, becoming the Dominican Republic's first woman doctor and first pediatric specialist.
Her practice was restricted by law to treating women and children, and even then, only with the permission of the husband or father. Guaranteed an income by her husband's thriving pharmacy, she offered free treatment to the poor, bringing pediatric care to hundreds of families for the first time.
"Miss Doc," as she was known, became a revered figure in the Caribbean nation. Her reputation and her husband's position as a prominent businessman gained the couple a place in the Dominican social elite. They counted President Ulises Heureaux among their friends.
In 1894 Charles Fraser suffered a sudden fatal stroke at age fifty-four. Loguen attempted to carry on as she had before, but a variety of factors weighed against her remaining in Puerto Plata. Income from the pharmacy was essential to supporting her medical practice, but running it and Fraser's other enterprises consumed much of her time.
She also feared that her daughter, Gregoria, would not be able to obtain a proper education in the former Spanish colony, whose schools offered few opportunities for women.
Finally, the Dominican Republic, although independent since 1865, had yet to achieve political stability, and remained prone to periods of civil violence.
After visiting her sister in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1896, Loguen returned to settle her affairs in Puerto Plata. The sale of the pharmacy and of Anaconia, the Fraser plantation, provided her with substantial funds. She kept title to her house in the port city, leasing it to provide further income.
Hoping to return to private practice in Washington, Loguen was shocked by the sharp deterioration in race relations that had taken place in the United States. Reconstruction-era civil rights laws had either been repealed or were actively ignored.
The capital city, like much of the nation, had adopted segregationist policies throughout all spheres of public life. She found herself unable to buy or rent suitable medical offices, and the schools she had in mind for Gregoria were "for whites only."
In 1897, she traveled to France with Gregoria and enrolled her in a boarding school in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb. Giving up plans to practice medicine in Washington, Loguen purchased a house in Syracuse, returning to the community of her childhood and to the many family members she had not seen since her wedding.
Gregoria joined her and was admitted in 1901 to the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. Life in the city's small Black American community restored stability to Loguen.
Recognized as the matriarch of a respected family, she practiced pediatric medicine in her home and became mentor to the midwives who attended to many of the medical needs of the Black American communities of central New York State.
With the death of Amelia's husband in 1907, Loguen returned to her sister's house in Washington, motivated in some part by the financial challenges facing both women. Some thirteen years after her husband's death, Loguen found her savings dwindling as she approached retirement age.
She reasoned that the sale of the Syracuse house and a sharing of expenses with Amelia would benefit both widowed sisters. To further replenish her nest egg, Loguen accepted a position in 1908 as "resident physician" at the Blue Plains Industrial School for Colored Boys, a segregated school for problem children that had been built in an undeveloped area of Maryland at the mouth of the Potomac River.
Several months later, Gregoria visited Blue Plains and found her mother in a state of exhaustion. The job title notwithstanding, Loguen was expected to take care of the school's fourteen adolescent boys, some with troubled histories, by cooking, cleaning, and performing every type of menial household task, in addition to providing the services of a doctor.
Gregoria packed her mother's belongings and took her back to Washington, ignoring threats by the school superintendent to sue for breach of contract.
Loguen did not establish a formal practice again, but remained an active physician in her later years. As a member of the Order of Malachites, an Black American professional service organization, she gave at least two days a week to seeing patients at a Washington women's clinic. In 1917, she moved to the nearby home of Gregoria and her husband, John Goins, residing with them for the rest of her life. She was in the U.S. Census of 1920 as one of only sixty-five Black American women licensed to practice medicine.
Although Loguen's achievements were not cataloged in histories written during her lifetime, she was not forgotten by the communities she served. Her arrival for a visit to Puerta Plata drew crowds to greet her. I
n 1926 Howard University honored Loguen with a dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her graduation from medical school.
She was diagnosed with kidney disease in 1928 and during the last years of her life, she suffered from dementia. She died at home with Gregoria at her side. Although she had not lived in Syracuse for twenty-five years, an obituary appeared in the Syracuse Journal.
When news of her death reached the Dominican Republic, President Rafael Trujillo declared a nine-day period of national mourning, with flags flown at half-staff.
In 2000, the 150th anniversary of Loguen's birth was marked by SUNY Upstate Medical University with the establishment of a scholarship and annual lecture bearing her name, and the unveiling of a portrait of Loguen, commissioned by the medical school's alumni association and hung in a place of honor in the Health Sciences Library. The city of Syracuse renamed a street adjacent to the medical school's hospital "Sarah Loguen Place" and the State of New York placed a historical marker at the site, recognizing the significance of her graduation.
Sarah Loguen Park, built by volunteers on a small triangle of land close to the house where she grew up, was dedicated in 2005. Upstate Medical University opened the Dr. Sarah Loguen Center in downtown Syracuse in 2008.
Loguen's life and legacy reflect several broad currents of Black American history. In the ebullient years following the triumph over slavery, a window of opportunity briefly opened for Black Americans, especially for those who had managed to become literate during the slavery era.
With the support of the activists who nurtured her, Loguen was one of the relatively few who was able to take advantage of the egalitarian moment, which abruptly ended in the new constraints of Jim Crow racism. Adapting to changed circumstances, Loguen turned her talents and energies inward toward community and family.
More than sixty-five years after her death, with segregation no longer legal and new interest in recovering the lost history of those who persevered through it, Loguen's pioneering contributions were recognized by the society she had helped to shape.
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| Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser | January 29, 1850 - April 9, 1933 |
Sarah Loguen Fraser was a pioneering Black American physician specializing in pediatrics, who also became the first female Doctor in the Dominican Republic while she was living there with her husband.
“I will never, never see a human being in need of aid again and not be able to help.” — Sarah Loguen Fraser, M.D.
She was born in Syracuse, New York, as Marinda Sarah Loguen, the daughter of Caroline Storum and the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Both parents were lifelong activists in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and they established their family home as a "station" (safe house) in the underground railroad, harboring some 1,500 African Americans who passed through Syracuse en route to asylum in Canada during the decades preceding the Civil War. The U.S. Fugitive Slave Act, which criminalized any failure to report knowledge of the whereabouts of an escaped slave, became federal law the year of Sarah Loguen's birth. This posed new threats to the entire family and especially to Reverend Loguen, who had escaped from slavery in his youth.
Educated at the church school established by her father, Sarah Loguen gained practical medical experience during childhood by assisting in the care of fugitives, many of whom arrived at the Loguen house suffering from injuries or illnesses incurred in their escapes.
Denied access to mainstream medical institutions, the Loguens employed traditional Iroquois healing techniques taught to them by a circle of sympathetic Haudenosaunee women.
In an unpublished biography, Loguen is quoted as citing two related factors in motivating her to become a doctor: a sense of helplessness in witnessing the physical suffering of others and a desire to continue to work for the advancement of Black Americans after emancipation.
"To have those of my race come to me for help--and for me to be able to give it--will be all the Heaven I want," she said.
Loguen's hope for a formal medical education was realized after the establishment in 1870 of Syracuse University, one of the first institutions of higher learning to admit men and women of all races as students.
In preparation for the entrance exam, she was tutored in biology and chemistry by Michael Benedict, a prominent white physician who had been active in the underground railroad and served as a frontline Union surgeon in the Civil War.
Loguen graduated from the Syracuse University College of Medicine (now Upstate Medical University of the State University of New York [SUNY]) in 1876. She was the first woman to earn an M.D. degree from the school and is believed to be the fourth Black American woman to become a licensed physician in the United States.
In 1881, after serving internships in pediatric-obstetric medicine at the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia and the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, she moved to the home of her older sister, Amelia, in Washington, D.C., and went into private practice.
The eminent writer Frederick Douglass, Amelia's father-in-law and a longtime friend and political ally of the Loguen family, presented the young doctor with a "shingle" to hang in the window of her office.
With neither of Sarah's parents alive, Douglass took it upon himself to find her a suitable husband. To that end, he arranged an exchange of letters with Dr. Charles Fraser, a well-to-do pharmacist and plantation owner who lived in Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic.
Fraser, who was of Afro-Caribbean and Danish descent, came to the United States, and following a brief courtship, the couple married in Syracuse in 1882, sailing from New York to Puerto Plata a week after their wedding. They had one child.
With no previous knowledge of Spanish, Loguen studied the language and passed the requisite certification exam at the University of Santo Domingo in 1884, becoming the Dominican Republic's first woman doctor and first pediatric specialist.
Her practice was restricted by law to treating women and children, and even then, only with the permission of the husband or father. Guaranteed an income by her husband's thriving pharmacy, she offered free treatment to the poor, bringing pediatric care to hundreds of families for the first time.
"Miss Doc," as she was known, became a revered figure in the Caribbean nation. Her reputation and her husband's position as a prominent businessman gained the couple a place in the Dominican social elite. They counted President Ulises Heureaux among their friends.
In 1894 Charles Fraser suffered a sudden fatal stroke at age fifty-four. Loguen attempted to carry on as she had before, but a variety of factors weighed against her remaining in Puerto Plata. Income from the pharmacy was essential to supporting her medical practice, but running it and Fraser's other enterprises consumed much of her time.
She also feared that her daughter, Gregoria, would not be able to obtain a proper education in the former Spanish colony, whose schools offered few opportunities for women.
Finally, the Dominican Republic, although independent since 1865, had yet to achieve political stability, and remained prone to periods of civil violence.
After visiting her sister in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1896, Loguen returned to settle her affairs in Puerto Plata. The sale of the pharmacy and of Anaconia, the Fraser plantation, provided her with substantial funds. She kept title to her house in the port city, leasing it to provide further income.
Hoping to return to private practice in Washington, Loguen was shocked by the sharp deterioration in race relations that had taken place in the United States. Reconstruction-era civil rights laws had either been repealed or were actively ignored.
The capital city, like much of the nation, had adopted segregationist policies throughout all spheres of public life. She found herself unable to buy or rent suitable medical offices, and the schools she had in mind for Gregoria were "for whites only."
In 1897, she traveled to France with Gregoria and enrolled her in a boarding school in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb. Giving up plans to practice medicine in Washington, Loguen purchased a house in Syracuse, returning to the community of her childhood and to the many family members she had not seen since her wedding.
Gregoria joined her and was admitted in 1901 to the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. Life in the city's small Black American community restored stability to Loguen.
Recognized as the matriarch of a respected family, she practiced pediatric medicine in her home and became mentor to the midwives who attended to many of the medical needs of the Black American communities of central New York State.
With the death of Amelia's husband in 1907, Loguen returned to her sister's house in Washington, motivated in some part by the financial challenges facing both women. Some thirteen years after her husband's death, Loguen found her savings dwindling as she approached retirement age.
She reasoned that the sale of the Syracuse house and a sharing of expenses with Amelia would benefit both widowed sisters. To further replenish her nest egg, Loguen accepted a position in 1908 as "resident physician" at the Blue Plains Industrial School for Colored Boys, a segregated school for problem children that had been built in an undeveloped area of Maryland at the mouth of the Potomac River.
Several months later, Gregoria visited Blue Plains and found her mother in a state of exhaustion. The job title notwithstanding, Loguen was expected to take care of the school's fourteen adolescent boys, some with troubled histories, by cooking, cleaning, and performing every type of menial household task, in addition to providing the services of a doctor.
Gregoria packed her mother's belongings and took her back to Washington, ignoring threats by the school superintendent to sue for breach of contract.
Loguen did not establish a formal practice again, but remained an active physician in her later years. As a member of the Order of Malachites, an Black American professional service organization, she gave at least two days a week to seeing patients at a Washington women's clinic. In 1917, she moved to the nearby home of Gregoria and her husband, John Goins, residing with them for the rest of her life. She was in the U.S. Census of 1920 as one of only sixty-five Black American women licensed to practice medicine.
Although Loguen's achievements were not cataloged in histories written during her lifetime, she was not forgotten by the communities she served. Her arrival for a visit to Puerta Plata drew crowds to greet her. I
n 1926 Howard University honored Loguen with a dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her graduation from medical school.
She was diagnosed with kidney disease in 1928 and during the last years of her life, she suffered from dementia. She died at home with Gregoria at her side. Although she had not lived in Syracuse for twenty-five years, an obituary appeared in the Syracuse Journal.
When news of her death reached the Dominican Republic, President Rafael Trujillo declared a nine-day period of national mourning, with flags flown at half-staff.
In 2000, the 150th anniversary of Loguen's birth was marked by SUNY Upstate Medical University with the establishment of a scholarship and annual lecture bearing her name, and the unveiling of a portrait of Loguen, commissioned by the medical school's alumni association and hung in a place of honor in the Health Sciences Library. The city of Syracuse renamed a street adjacent to the medical school's hospital "Sarah Loguen Place" and the State of New York placed a historical marker at the site, recognizing the significance of her graduation.
Sarah Loguen Park, built by volunteers on a small triangle of land close to the house where she grew up, was dedicated in 2005. Upstate Medical University opened the Dr. Sarah Loguen Center in downtown Syracuse in 2008.
Loguen's life and legacy reflect several broad currents of Black American history. In the ebullient years following the triumph over slavery, a window of opportunity briefly opened for Black Americans, especially for those who had managed to become literate during the slavery era.
With the support of the activists who nurtured her, Loguen was one of the relatively few who was able to take advantage of the egalitarian moment, which abruptly ended in the new constraints of Jim Crow racism. Adapting to changed circumstances, Loguen turned her talents and energies inward toward community and family.
More than sixty-five years after her death, with segregation no longer legal and new interest in recovering the lost history of those who persevered through it, Loguen's pioneering contributions were recognized by the society she had helped to shape.
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