We are all familiar with the story of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the cardiologist who became the first surgeon to perform a successful open-heart procedure in the United States. However, the story of Dr. Myra Adele Logan is not widely known. Logan was a pioneering surgeon whose life and work were marked by her historic firsts, life-saving research, and selfless humanitarianism. Myra was born in 1908 in Tuskegee, Alabama, the eighth child of Warren and Adella Hunt Logan. Her parents held education and optimism in the highest regard, neither of which were lost on Myra. Booker T. Washington was a neighbor. Her father, Warren Logan, was the treasurer and a trustee of Tuskegee Institute.
It was therefore not surprising that Logan started her education at Tuskegee’s Laboratory, the Children’s house. She graduated with honors from Tuskegee High School and went to Atlanta University, where she graduated as valedictorian of her class in 1927. Logan attended Atlanta University in Georgia, graduating with a B.A. in 1927 as valedictorian of her class. She went north for graduate studies, taking her master’s degree in psychology from Columbia University in New York. After working for a time on a YWCA staff in Connecticut, Logan finally made up her mind to study medicine, winning the first Walter Gray Crump $10,000 four-year scholarship, that was started to help African-American students, to New York Medical College.
After graduating from medical school in 1933, she began her internship at Harlem Hospital, where she worked in the emergency room. Her years at Harlem Hospital in the emergency room and riding ambulance as a young internee prepared Logan well for her future career in surgery. She not only delivered babies on the way to the hospital, but also repaired numerous stab wounds to the heart. While working at Harlem Hospital, Logan met the well known Harlem Renaissance artist, Charles Alston in 1943, while he was working on a mural project at the Harlem Hospital, where Logan was a medical intern at the time. They married a year later on April 8, 1944. Logan served as a model for Alston”s Modern Medicine, in which she appears as a nurse holding a baby.
She became an associate surgeon at the Harlem Hospital, a visiting surgeon at nearby Syndenham Hospital and maintained a private practice. Myra Adele Logan worked with the distinguished fellow Harlem Hospital physician, Dr. Louis T. Wright, on antibiotic research including Aureomycin. Her history-making moment arrived in 1943 when she became the first woman to perform bypass surgery, an open-heart surgical procedure, the ninth operation of its kind. She developed her specialty in children’s heart surgery. She also became interested in the antibiotic drugs, researching aureomycin and other drugs and published her results in Archives of Surgery and Journal of American Medical Surgery. In 1951, Logan was elected as a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the first African-American woman to become a member of the group.
During the 1960s, she researched the early detection and treatment of breast cancer. She developed X-ray processes that could more accurately detect differences in tissue density, allowing tumors to be discovered earlier. Her research saved countless lives. She was published in several medical journals and was one of the first Black women to be elected to the American College of Surgeons. Logan also became a founding partner and treasurer of the Upper Manhattan Medical Group of the Health Insurance Plan, one of the first group practices in the United States. A concept that houses physicians of various specialties under one roof and that is the norm today.
Myra, who practiced medicine to serve, rather than simply to earn a paycheck, also found the time to address the needs of her community in other ways. Logan found time in her busy schedule to stay committed to social issues. Early in her career, she was a member of the New York State Committee on Discrimination, but resigned in protest in 1944 when Governor Dewey ignored the anti-discrimination legislation the committee had proposed. She worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Planned Parenthood, and the New York State Fair Employment Practices Committee, among other organizations. After her retirement in 1970 she served on the New York State Workmen’s Compensation Board. She was known for encouraging people to walk tall and proud, and be who they wanted to be. Myra Adele Logan was a pioneering doctor known for her skills and humanitarianism.
