Alice Woodby-McKane

Happy birthday, Alice Woodby. She was born on February 12, 1865 in Pennsylvania, the same year the Confederates lost the Civil War and slavery ended legally. In 1892, she earned her medical degree from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.

After graduating, she moved to Augusta and became Georgia’s first black woman to be a licensed physician. I say licensed, because black women been doctoring since the beginning of time.

Alice was working in Augusta when she met Cornelius McKane, the great-grandson of a Liberian king. Cornelius was also a doctor (and a surgeon). They had a lot in common ♒♒, fell in love, and married in 1893.

Cornelius was living in Savannah at the time, so she moved to the Port with her man and they built the first nurse training program for black folks in Southeast Georgia 4 months after marrying. Tuition was $4 a month but free for students who planned to practice in Africa. Two years later, they graduated four nurses. Ain’t about numbers though; it’s about impact.

In 1895, they moved to Liberia and made more history, opening Liberia’s first hospital and nurse training school. The U.S. government appointed Alice as the medical examiner for black Civil War vets who moved from the U.S. to Liberia.

After Alice came down with yellow fever, they moved back to Savannah in 1896. She opened a medical office on West Broad Street that specialized in gynecology and women’s diseases. She petitioned Chatham County Superior Court and obtained a charter to operate a hospital for women and children and a nursing training school. That hospital, called McKane Hospital, opened in 1896.

In 1901, the hospital was adopted and renamed Charity Hospital. 8 years after that, the couple moved to Boston where Cornelius died 3 years later. Alice kept practicing medicine and became an advocate for women’s suffrage, an NAACP member, a Republican committeewoman, and an author of The Fraternal Sick Book in 1913 and Clover Leaves in 1914.

Shug (my daughter’s great-grandmother) used to say, “Don’t cry for me when I go. I lived.” I think Alice would’ve agreed. After living a helluva life, Alice Woodby-McKane passed away in 1948 at the age of 83.

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