Anderson Ruffin Abbott

Anderson Ruffin Abbott was born on 7 April 1837 in Toronto, then Upper Canada, the son of Wilson Ruffin Abbott, a Virginia-born businessman and landowner who became one of the city's most successful Black entrepreneurs, and Ellen Toyer. He grew up in a prominent Black family, attended William King's school in the Elgin settlement near present-day North Buxton and the Toronto Academy, and later studied at Oberlin College in Ohio.

In 1857 he enrolled at University College in Toronto to study chemistry, and went on to train in medicine, including a supervised placement with Dr Alexander Thomas Augusta, the American-born Black doctor who ran Toronto's hospital. In 1861 Abbott received a licence to practise from the Medical Board of Upper Canada, becoming the first Canadian-born Black physician. Sources differ on whether he formally graduated.

During the American Civil War he served the Union as an acting assistant surgeon. After Abraham Lincoln was shot on 14 April 1865, Abbott was among the select group who stood vigil over the dying president. In gratitude, Mary Todd Lincoln later presented him with a black-and-white shawl her husband had worn to his first inauguration.

Abbott married Mary Ann Casey in 1871 and they moved to Chatham, Ontario. He served as president of the Wilberforce Educational Institute from 1873 to 1880, using the position to fight racially segregated schools, and in 1874 he was appointed coroner for Kent County, the first Black man to hold that office.

In 1896 he accepted an appointment in Chicago as medical superintendent of Provident Hospital, the first hospital in the United States to train Black nurses. He returned to Toronto in 1897 and spent his later years writing on Black history and other subjects. He died there on 29 December 1913, aged 76, and is remembered as a pioneer who opened medicine to later generations of Black Canadians.