A Medical Journey

George Rice was a member of Dartmouth's class of 1869 and one of the first African-American students to enroll in Dartmouth in the 1800s. Rice came to Dartmouth from a preparatory school in Massachusetts. The son of a steamship steward, Rice knew before he arrived in Hanover that he wanted to become a physician someday. Given that minorities were few and far between on Dartmouth's campus even in 1869, it's hard to imagine the hurdles and challenges that Rice faced over a hundred years earlier.

Eventually, he would graduate and move to Paris to begin his medical education after being rejected by Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons because of his race. In 1874, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh with the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Master in Surgery. Rice went on to practice medicine for over fifty years in Great Britain, primarily in Sutton, Surrey. He served as the public vaccinator for Sutton, Cheam, and Carshalton until the year before his death in 1935.

To learn more about George Rice, or to explore other stories of minority students from Dartmouth's past, come to Rauner and ask to see the alumni files of any of the college's past graduates.