Plymouth Hospital
& Nurses' Training School

The Exclusion

In 1903, a young Black doctor arrived in Boston from Alabama. Dr. Cornelius N. Garland had graduated from Shaw University’s medical program in 1901, completed postgraduate training at the University of London, and passed the Massachusetts medical exam with high honors.

But the city’s hospitals refused him privileges. Black doctors were shut out of practicing at Boston’s hospitals. Black women were denied admission to its nursing programs. Garland himself would later say that Black women were “scarcely admitted generally in the hospitals of the state.”

The Response

With donations from local Black churches, Garland purchased a brownstone at 12 East Springfield Street in Boston’s South End, and in 1908 he opened Plymouth Hospital and Nurses’ Training School, the first and only Black hospital in the city.

Black churches across the South End each adopted a ward, furnished it, and held fundraisers to sustain it. Columbus Avenue AME Zion Church. Charles Street AME Church. Black physicians like Dr. Columbus William Harrison, who served beside Garland for a decade, came to practice the medicine they were barred from practicing anywhere else.

Dr. Garland specialized in operative care and women’s diseases. Of the patients admitted between 1909 and 1914, more than three-quarters were women. Six hundred people including children were seen in the free outpatient department. Two hundred more were cared for through home visits. Plymouth Hospital was, in practice, a center for Black women’s health, children’s health, and community care, built and sustained by the very community it served.

This was the community’s answer to a system that excluded them.

The Witness

Lucille Allen Remembers

Nursing students at Plymouth Hospital & Nurses’ Training School, from the 1914 hospital report.

In 1976, fifty years after she trained at Plymouth Hospital, a nurse named Lucille Allen sat down with an interviewer from the Black Bostonia Oral History Project and told her story.

She had come to Boston from Mississippi in 1916, at the age of sixteen. She went to night school. She worked for families in Brookline. She always wanted to be a nurse. But no hospital in Boston would take a Black woman to train.

In 1921, Dr. Garland took her in. She trained at Plymouth Hospital for three years, finishing in 1924. The hospital was, in her words, “just a house, four floors, and we at the time didn’t really have equipment.” Dr. Garland taught general nursing. Dr. Harrison taught physiology. Dr. Lattimore gave the anesthesia.

And yet inside that house on East Springfield Street, they did everything. Allen described all kinds of operations. White doctors sometimes brought patients in. She said they never lost more than one patient in the whole three years she was there.

What stayed with her, decades later, was Garland’s reputation and the respect he commanded even from those who excluded him. In 1928, when Allen herself needed surgery at the Deaconness Hospital, it was Dr. Frank Lahey, the founder of the Lahey Clinic, who insisted that Garland be present.

The system that excluded Garland privately recognized his brilliance.

Lucille Allen, interviewed by Lavert Stuart, February 18, 1976. Black Bostonia Oral History Project, City of Boston Archives.

The Unbroken Line

Plymouth Hospital closed in 1928 after a bitter debate within the Black community over whether to pursue integration or maintain separate institutions. The building became apartments. The story was nearly lost.

The crisis Garland addressed has not ended. He built a hospital that centered Black women’s health in 1908. Today, Black women in Massachusetts are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. The neighborhoods he served still carry the highest burden of infant mortality, maternal morbidity, and health inequity in the city. Vital Village Networks’ mission to optimize child, family and community health and wellbeing continues what Garland started, community-developed solutions to advance health justice.

The neighborhoods Garland served still carry the highest burden of health inequity in the city.

The Vision

Plymouth Hospital & Nurses’ Training School Living Museum, Archive & Health Justice Institute

We are working to purchase and restore 12 East Springfield Street as a place where the community that built this institution is honored, and where the work of health justice continues.

2028 will mark the 100th anniversary of the hospital’s closing. We intend to mark it not with mourning but with restoration, returning the building to its purpose as a center of Black health, healing, and self-determination.

In 1908, this building was more than a hospital. It was a gathering place for a community that had been shut out of every other institution in the city. Churches met here. Nurses learned here. Families received care here. The restored Plymouth Hospital will be that kind of place again: a center where the work of health justice, community connection, and collective care continues.

Programming will include community conversations about birth justice, maternal health, and child wellbeing, the same work Dr. Garland began in this building over a century ago.

Timeline