In the history of medicine, Emma Ann Reynolds is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists Emma Ann Reynolds as African-American physician.
Emma Ann Reynolds was born at Frankfort in 1862. Her recorded nationality is United States. She trained at Provident Hospital and Feinberg School of Medicine.
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and germ theory arrived within fifty years and made modern surgery possible for the first time.
The test of medical work is whether practice changed, not whether the argument was elegant.
That the work was done from United States matters: hospitals, training and research funding are unevenly distributed, and they decide which questions can be asked.
Emma Ann Reynolds died in 1917, aged 55. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
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