In 1852, James McCune Smith, the first African American to hold a medical degree, was invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society, now known as the American Geographical Society, which promoted a new science. In 1844 Smith became the first Black physician in the US to publish a scientific paper in the formal medical literature, a case series of 5 women whose menses stopped with opioid use.

In A Dissertation on the Influence of Climate on Longevity, published in 1846, Smith drew on English and French references, geography, and the new field of biostatistics to question Calhoun’s claims. He compared mortality rates with latitude coordinates to show that people lived longer in states that abolished slavery, like New Hampshire and Connecticut, than in Georgia, where slavery was legal.

Smith’s life illustrates racism’s deleterious effects on career advancement. Denied access to medical organizations, networks, and journals, Smith published research in periodicals for Black readers. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have increasingly used these periodicals as primary sources to trace the contributions of Black individuals to their disciplines, which physicians and historians of medicine can also undertake.