Lucy Orintha Oxley (1912-1991)

Pioneering physician and cancer researcher Lucy Orintha Oxley was born on August 19, 1912, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edmund Oxley, a minister from Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was the first Black graduate of Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University. Her mother, Esther Winifred Turner Oxley, was an educator from Washington, DC, and a graduate of Howard University. Lucy and her young siblings, Edmund Jr. and Elizabeth, grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they all excelled in classical piano.

Graduating from Woodward High School at 16 in 1928, Oxley enrolled in the University of Cincinnati’s six-year medical program, where she was both the only woman and the only African American in an all-white male program. She received the Bachelor of Science in 1933, and a Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1935. During her time at medical school, she became a member of the Alumnal Association of the College of Medicine and the Zeta Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Despite her academic excellence, Oxley was confronted with continuing blatant racism throughout her studies. She was denied an internship at General Hospital, a privilege reserved for the top 15 students, solely because of her ethnicity. The dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Alfred Friedlander, bluntly told her, “Lucy, you are a Negro, and we don’t want you.” This discrimination only intensified her resolve. She was the sole member of her class to pass the national medical boards and subsequently completed her internship at Howard University’s Freedmen’s Hospital during the 1935-1936 school year.

In 1936, UC’s College of Medicine awarded Oxley the Doctor of Medicine degree, becoming the first person of color in its 115-year history to do so. However, she continued to face discrimination and could not gain admission privileges at any Cincinnati hospitals.

This continual bias pushed Dr. Oxley to leave Cincinnati. From 1936 to 1940, she served as the medical director for student health at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina and at Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, both HBCUs. Upon returning to Cincinnati in 1940, she opened a general practice in her family’s home and later established a practice in the city’s West End. In 1945, she began working as a cancer researcher at the Institutum Divi Thomae in East Walnut Hills. The following year, 1946, she co-founded the Cincinnati Society of General Physicians.

In 1948, Dr. Oxley was instrumental in establishing the Ohio Academy of General Practice. A decade later, in 1958, she opened a private practice in Walnut Hills, constructing a medical building on Dexter Avenue to house that practice. In 1974, she co-founded the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians (OAFP), and in 1984, she became the first woman and African American to receive the OAFP Physician of the Year award for her dedication and excellence in the medical field.

Dr. Lucy Orintha Oxley, mother to one daughter, Francine Smith, died from lung cancer in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 10, 1991. She was 78. On November 13, 2018, the Medical College of Cincinnati unveiled a commemorative panel in the Medical Sciences Building, celebrating Oxley’s life and medical career.

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