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from Brooke Bailey, The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Healers and Scientists (part of the 20th Century Women Series) [Holbrook, Mass.: Bob Adams, Inc., 1994] pp. 148-149

As the series name suggests, most of the women listed in the book were born in the last quarter of the 19th century or the 20th century. McKane is one of the few women born earlier who is mentioned in this book.

Alice McKane was half of a dynamic husband-wife team devoted to bettering the status of African-Americans. McKane and her husband, both physicians, organized health care in the rural South and in Liberia. McKane also found time to write in her later years, publishing a book of her poems at age forty-nine.

      Alice Woodby's childhood was full of loss. She was born in 1865 in Bridgewater, Pennsylvania, in 1865, and lost her parents, Charles Woodby and Elizabeth B. Fraiser Woodby, before she was seven years old. she also lost her eyesight for a time, recovering after three years of blindness. She attended public schools until age twenty-one and the Institute for Colored Youth in Pennsylvania until age twenty-four. In 1889 she enrolled at the women's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

      Less than a year after she earned her medical degree in 1892, Woodby married another practicing physician, Cornelius McKane. He was the grandson of a Liberian King who had been born in British Guiana; in time he became a great early civil rights activist in America. McKane was, variously, a clergyman, teacher, scholar, author, and speaker. Alice McKane was h is match in drive and philanthropic leanings, and soon after their wedding she urged him to help her with a project she had in mind.

      McKane wanted to open doors in medicine for other African-American women, and in 1893 the McKanes founded southeast Georgia's first training school for nurses. The first students graduated two years later, and in the meantime the McKanes and their trainees ran a much-needed clinic out of the school, treating local citizens for no fee. They were obliged to refuse about ten patients per week because of short resources, which were supplemented only by donations from local churches.

      The couple traveled to Monrovia, Liberia, to work under similarly uncharted conditions. Alice McKane worked as a medical examiner for the United States government, overseeing the health of Civil War veterans living there. During her stay she co-organized and headed the department of women's diseases at Monrovia's fledgling hospital. Her work there soon threatened her health, however, and she returned with her husband to Savannah, Georgia, to recover from an African fever. By 1896, she was back on her feet.

      Back in Georgia, the McKanes turned their project into the McKane Hospital for Women and Children and Training School for Nurses. Local white doctors helped with donations of their time and money. The McKanes, however, had three children around the time the hospital was founded, and after it was running they decided to leave Georgia in search of better education for them.

      The family moved to Boston, where Alice McKane was a member of the NAACP and an active suffragist. She practiced medicine for many years, focusing on women's diseases. She also maintained her commitment to introducing other women to medicine, teaching nursing students at the Plymouth Hospital. She wrote in her spare time, publishing a book on healing, The Fraternal Sick Book, in 1913. A year later, her collection of poetry, Clover Leaves, was published.

      Alice McKane died at age eighty-three.

To find out more

Davis, Mariana W., Ed. Contributions of Black Women to America, Vol. II. Columbia, SC.: Kenday Press, 1982

Smith, Jessie Carey, Notable Black American Women. Detroit, MI.: Gale Research, Inc., 1992

Who's Who in Colored America, Vol. I. New York: Who's Who in Colored America Corp., 1927

For More Information

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