Dr. May Edward Chinn, was a trailblazer who, in addition to achieving several medical firsts, was instrumental in the development of the PAP smear in the early 1930s. Her father, William Lafayette, escaped slavery from a Virginia plantation at the age of 11 in 1864 and made his way to Great Barrington, MA, where he worked at odd jobs. Her mother, Lulu Ann, was the daughter of a Chickahominy Native American and a slave. At 15, she got a job as a live-in housekeeper for the Tiffanys, the well-known family of artisans and jewelers, in their mansion on Long Island. She gave birth to her only child, May Edward, on April 15, 1896, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, home of civil rights leader W.E.B Du Bois.
Her mother saved money from her meager wages to send May to the Bordentown Manual and Training Industrial School, a boarding school in New Jersey. There it was as peaceful and orderly as New York had been loud and turbulent. But her stay ended when May contracted osteomyelitis of the jaw and had to return to New York for surgery. Chinn remained in New York City after her surgery there, but was unable to finish high school. So May returned to mother in Great Barrington. Life on the estate was idyllic with the Tiffanys. Growing up, the Tiffanys treated May like family. She attended musical concerts in New York City and learned to play piano, accompanying the singer Paul Robeson during his formative years in the early 1920's.
Although Chinn never graduated from high school, she had the good fortune of being exposed to education in a fashion many young Black girls never experienced in her time. The Tiffany family also taught her the German and French languages. Because she grew up in an environment that exposed her to various levels of culture, Chinn was able to navigate in the world without her diploma. On Saturday mornings she would be taken into the city to see Broadway shows and musical concerts. But when Charles Tiffany died in 1902, Lulu's services were no longer needed, so mother and child eventually had to return to New York City.
When she was in the 11th grade, because of a soured romance, failing grades in Latin and her poverty, May suddenly drop out of high school and took a job in a factory tying ribbons in calendars. This broke her mother's heart. “The sole purpose of her working was to see me through school. She wanted me to get a college degree", May recounted. A year later May Chinn decided to take the entrance examinations for Columbia Teachers College on a whim, when a friend received a scholarship there. She took the entrance examination to Columbia Teachers College and to her surprise, she passed the exams and enrolled in 1917, as the United States entered World War I. The day the test results arrived in the mail was the happiest of Lulu Chinn's life.
Lulu provide the money for May to go to college, but she also moved the family from the Bronx to Harlem so May could walk to classes. In the 1920's, Harlem was the place to be, the cultural capital of the Black world, where jazz and a new Black intelligentsia changed forever White people's notions of Blacks and Black people's notions of themselves. May met many of the prominent figures in the Harlem Renaissance. She met Countee Cullen, who was writing vast rhapsodies about the African past, Langston Hughes, whose poems and stories celebrated the jazz‐filled Harlem nights, the anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. She was flattered when Paul Robeson asked her to accompany him at concerts.
Chinn studied her first love, music, until a professor mocked her race as unfit for playing classical music. A German‐born professor who was determined that no person of syncopated leanings would ever profane the likes of Bach and Beethoven. Her heart sank when she realized that in order to get a degree in music education, she would have to take five more courses with him. At the same time, she received high praise for a scientific paper she wrote on sewage disposal, so she changed her major to science. In her senior year, she secured a full-time position as a lab technician in clinical pathology.
May Chinn finished Teachers College in just three and a half years and in 1921, she received a bachelor’s degree in science from Columbia Teachers College. Chinn proceeded to study medicine at Bellevue Medical College in New York, becoming its first African-American woman graduate in 1926. Upon graduation Chinn found that no hospital would allow her practicing privileges. The Rockefeller Institute had seriously considered her for a research fellowship until they discovered that she was Black. With her fair skin and last name, many assumed that she was White or Chinese. Many Black workers often snubbed her because they assumed she was passing as White, and they did not want to jeopardize her position.
Harlem Hospital was the only medical institution in the city that offered Chinn an internship. Following graduation, Chinn completed her internship at Harlem Hospital in 1928, also becoming the first Black woman to do so. Later, she became the first Black woman to be granted hospital privileges at Harlem Hospital. During this time she rode along with the paramedics on ambulance calls--and was the first woman to do it. Though she was the first African American woman intern at Harlem Hospital, racial and gender discrimination kept her from obtaining hospital privileges there. The young Dr. Chinn often found herself at odds with her male colleagues, and even though it was hazardous, she came to prefer ambulance duty.
When discriminatory practices in the health care field limited Chinn’s prospects of working in a hospital, she opened her own practice. In 1925, Dr. May Chinn opened a private practice on Edgecombe Avenue, working with other African American physicians at the Edgecombe Sanitarium for non-White patients. Her office was on the parlor floor, and she and her parents slept on the next floor above, while the top floor served as an operating room. As a Black woman, May faced adversity every step of the way, but fought through it all and achieved incredible success. May Edward Chinn described her early practice in Harlem as akin to an old-fashioned family practice in the rural South a century earlier.
She attended most of her patients in her office or in their own homes, even for surgery in some cases, while minor procedures were done in her office. She treated people who otherwise would not have received medical care and she often went into dangerous neighborhoods. Here she developed a curiosity surrounding cancer detection, having seen far too many elderly patients with that diagnosis which was usually a death sentence. Her interest in the early cancer diagnosis developed during these years, as she saw many patients who were very ill with terminal diseases, often late-stage cancer.
Because of this interest she took a master's degree in Public Health from Columbia University in 1933. In 1940, Harlem Hospital granted Chinn admitting privileges, in part due to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s push for integration in the wake of the Harlem Riot of 1935. Following her graduation from Columbia, Chinn studied cytological methods for cancer detection with George Papanicolaou, noted for his work for cancer treatments. She noticed that many of her older patients were dying from various cancers rather than heart attacks or other illness, and she wondered if there were ways to predict or detect cancers early enough to have them treated. Dr. Chinn also conducted research into how family history can be connected with cancer probability predictions.
She became an advocate for cancer screening to detect cancer at its earliest stages. May was still prohibited from establishing formal affiliations with New York hospitals. When she asked for research information about her patients from the city's hospital clinics, they refused. So, instead, she had her patients' biopsies read secretly for her at Memorial Hospital. Chinn accompanied her patients to their clinic appointments, explaining that she was the patient's family physician. In so doing, she could learn more about biopsy techniques while securing a firm diagnosis for her patients. Such resourcefulness typified Chinn's approach to the barriers she faced during her career.
It was her research for Dr. Papanikolaou that eventually led to the development of the Pap smear, a life-saving test for early detection of cervical cancer. In 1944, four years after Black physicians were granted admitting privileges at New York hospitals, she was invited by Dr. Elise Strang L'Esperance founder of the Strang Cancer Clinic at Memorial Hospital, to joined the Strang Clinic in New York to continue her cancer research. During the interview with Dr. L'Esperance, the subject of race was never mentioned. While there, Chinn promoted cancer screening methods for non-symptomatic patients, routine Pap smears, and the use of family medical histories to predict cancer risk.
She worked there for twenty-nine years and became a member of the Society of Surgical Oncology. In 1954 Dr. May Edward Chinn became a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and in 1957 she received a citation from the New York City Cancer Committee of the American Cancer Society. In her autobiographical paper written in 1977, Chinn noted that the committees established by Mayor Guardia after the Harlem riots were pivotal in integrating African Americans into medicine in New York City. Chinn saw this firsthand when she became the first African American woman granted admitting privileges at Harlem Hospital in 1940.
Like other African American women physicians of her era, Chinn worked long hours, overcame racism and sexism, but never got rich from her practice. By 1978 Chinn had given up her practice and begun examining African American students as a consultant to the Phelps-Stokes Fund. She also helped found the Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Society. When May Chinn died in 1980, she received honorary degrees from New York University and Columbia University. May Edward Chinn was an extraordinary woman, her work with cancer led her to improvements in cancer care through early diagnosis.