Many know the story of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, an African-American 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.
Five decades after Williams made history, Logan also became the first woman to perform an open heart surgery in 1943. The youngest of eight children, Logan was born in 1908 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her mother, Adella Hunt Logan, was a college graduate and politically active in the health care movements while 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.
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She went ahead to earn a master’s degree in psychology in New York City at Columbia University. Then, she turned her attention to medicine. But before doing so, she worked for some time for the YWCA in Connecticut.
Interestingly, Logan was the first to receive a four-year $10,000 Walter Gray Crump Scholarship that was started to help African-American students who had intentions of going to New York Medical College. In 1933, Logan graduated and did her internship and residency in surgery at the Harlem Hospital in New York City.
She became an associate surgeon at the Harlem Hospital, a visiting surgeon at nearby Syndenham Hospital and maintained a private practice.
Her history-making moment arrived in 1943 when she became the first woman to perform open-heart surgery, the ninth such operation, Amsterdam News reported. She soon began focusing on children’s heart surgery while also helping to develop antibiotics, including Aureomycin.
Logan further developed X-ray processes that made it possible to detect and treat breast cancer earlier. Before this, she had been elected a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and was the first African-American woman to become a member of the group.
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.
Her work with the National Cancer Committee, the National Medical Association Committee, Planned Parenthood, NAACP’s Health Committee, and the New York State Fair Employment Practices Committee, earned her praise.
An accomplished classical pianist, Logan retired from medical practices in 1970 but still went on to serve on several boards, including the New York State Workmen’s Compensation Board. She died of lung cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital on January 13, 1977.
