Abby Connolly
There have been so many magnificent women who worked and made progress in the medical field and changed the game for generations to come.
One of those women was Georgia Rooks Dwelle, an African American physician from Georgia who made history after opening the first general hospital for African Americans in the state and the first obstetrical hospital for African American women.
Georgia was born in Albany, Georgia in 1884. Her father was a trustee of Spelman Seminary, a Black women’s liberal arts college, which was where she decided to go to school. After graduating, Georgia decided she wanted to go to medical school. She was the first Spelman graduate to do so.
She graduated from Meharry Medical College in Nashville with honors in 1904 before returning to Georgia to take the Georgia State Medical Board Examination. Georgia ended up receiving one of the best scores out of her peers that year.
After completing the exam, Georgia became one of three African-American women physicians in Georgia. She began practicing in the early 1900s and set up her own obstetrical and pediatrics practice in Atlanta.
Around that time, she noticed just how poor living conditions were for Black people in the city and how little access they had to proper medical care.
That’s when she decided to take matters into her own hands and establish the Dwelle Infirmary, the first general hospital for African Americans in Atlanta.
The hospital was very small with only two beds and a few rented rooms available for patients, but its services were crucial to the community and expanded over the years.
By 1920, the hospital also became the obstetrical hospital for African-American women, which was a huge milestone for women’s rights and healthcare.
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