Anderson Abbott was licensed as a doctor in Toronto in 1861

Anderson Ruffin Abbott was licensed to practise medicine in 1861, one of the earliest Black physicians trained in what was then Upper Canada, according to the University of Toronto and The Canadian Encyclopedia.

File photo: Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Abbott studied at the Toronto School of Medicine, then affiliated with the university. The photo does not depict him.

The University of Toronto describes him as the first Canadian-born Black doctor, in a 2018 article based on a Toronto Star feature. His life ran through some of the most important chapters of Black history in the country, from the Toronto of the 1830s to the American Civil War and back to southwestern Ontario.

He was born in Toronto on April 7, 1837, and died there on Dec. 29, 1913, The Canadian Encyclopedia reports. The encyclopedia says his parents, Wilson Abbott and Ellen Toyer, were both free from enslavement and ran a general store in Mobile, Ala. The family left after Wilson Abbott refused to meet a bond requirement, passed briefly through New Orleans and New York, and settled in Toronto in 1835. The University of Toronto calls him the son of immigrants from Alabama.

His schooling crossed the main Black communities of the era. The encyclopedia says he attended the Buxton Mission School near Chatham, then Toronto Academy, where he earned honours, and later Oberlin College in Ohio. (Buxton, founded as a settlement for Black families, is covered in our earlier report on its 50-acre farms.)

In 1857 he enrolled at University College in Toronto to study chemistry, the encyclopedia says. The following year he began studies at the Toronto School of Medicine, then followed with a supervised placement under Dr. Alexander Augusta. The University of Toronto says Augusta had graduated from Trinity College in 1856. Both sources say Abbott obtained his licence in 1861. Neither names the licensing body, and this report does not either.

Abbott then looked south. The encyclopedia says he applied for a post as an assistant surgeon in the Union Army and was unsuccessful. That fits a wider pattern in the period. Black volunteers faced exclusion from military service in several settings, a history traced in our report on Black volunteers turned away until 1916.

He found another route. In June 1863 he signed a contract as a civilian surgeon at the Contraband Hospital, later renamed Freedmen’s Hospital, at Camp Barker in Washington, D.C., the encyclopedia says. Augusta also worked there. Abbott later worked at other Washington hospitals. The University of Toronto, citing the Star, says he served as a contract surgeon and later as surgeon-in-chief at Freedmen’s Hospital. The two sources differ on that last title, and the encyclopedia does not use it.

The sources agree on one other point. When President Abraham Lincoln was shot in April 1865, Abbott was among the group that stood vigil for him, according to both the encyclopedia and the University of Toronto. The University of Toronto article also describes a gift to Abbott from Mary Todd Lincoln. It gives no primary source for that account, and this report has not independently confirmed it.

He returned to Canada in 1866. In 1871 he married Mary Ann Casey and moved to Chatham, where he was appointed coroner for Kent County and advocated for integrated schools, the encyclopedia says. The University of Toronto calls him the first Black coroner of Kent County. The encyclopedia does not make that claim.

Chatham was also the base of another figure in the same circle of Black activism. The newspaper work of Mary Ann Shadd, who published from the area, is the subject of our report on how she hid her name on her own newspaper.

Abbott moved to Dundas in 1881, according to the encyclopedia, which gives no reason. The University of Toronto says racial prejudice led to the move and that he worked there as an assistant editor of a newspaper, writing critical pieces under an alias. After time in Oakville, he took a post in Chicago in 1894 as surgeon-in-chief of Provident Hospital, a training hospital for Black nurses, and became medical superintendent in 1896, the encyclopedia says. He returned to Toronto in 1897 and wrote on Black history in his later years.

His legacy is formally recognized. The encyclopedia says a provincial plaque was unveiled in 2008 and that his archive was added to the Canada Memory of the World Register in 2023. The University of Toronto runs the Dr. Anderson Abbott Award for Black undergraduates.

The two principal sources disagree on small details, including the date of his marriage (1871 per the encyclopedia, “a few years” after his return per the University of Toronto) and the exact wording of his Washington role. Readers who want to cite him should note those differences.

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Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Anderson Abbott” (thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/anderson-abbott); University of Toronto News, “First Canadian-born Black doctor studied at U of T,” Feb. 9, 2018 (utoronto.ca/news/first-canadian-born-black-doctor-studied-u-t).