Louis T. Wright

Wright was born in LaGrange, Georgia. His father, Ceah Ketchan Wright, was born enslaved but obtained formal education, finishing medical school as valedictorian but later giving up his medical practice to be a Methodist minister. Ceah died shortly after Louis's birth and his mother, a sewing teacher named Lula Tompkins, remarried in 1899. Also a physician, Louis's step-father, William Fletcher Penn, was the first African-American to graduate from Yale School of Medicine. Penn, who became a prominent doctor in Atlanta and was the first African-American to own an automobile in the city, had a strong influence on Louis both as a physician and through the racism Louis watched him endure. He completed his postgraduate work at Howard University-affiliated Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, DC before returning to Georgia. He married public school teacher Corinne Cooke, and the couple had two daughters, Jane Cooke Wright and Barbara Wright Pierce, both of whom also became physicians and researchers. ==Medical career==

Shortly after completing medical school and moving back to Georgia, Wright joined the Army Medical Corps, serving as a lieutenant during World War I, stationed in France. While there he introduced intradermal vaccination for smallpox and was awarded the Purple Heart after a gas attack. In 1929 he was also appointed to serve as the first African-American police surgeon with the New York Police Department. He was a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American Medical Association. ==Civil rights activism and leadership==

Throughout his life Wright involved himself in civil rights efforts, beginning in college when he missed three weeks of school to join picket lines protesting D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film controversial for its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1940 he was the recipient of the Spingarn Medal for "his contribution to the healing of mankind and for his courageous position in the face of bitter attack." ==Death and legacy==

Wright had chronic health problems following his war service and was hospitalized for tuberculosis from 1939 to 1942. Though he returned to medicine thereafter and was appointed chief of surgery in 1943, he never fully recovered and died in 1952 at the age of 61. — Louis T. Wright ==Fictional portrayals==

Wright is the inspiration for the character Algernon Edwards, played by actor Andre Holland, in the Cinemax television drama series The Knick. Edwards, like Wright, graduated at the top of his class at Harvard Medical School and serves as the first African-American surgeon at the fictionalized Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan. Whereas the Harlem Hospital consisted a previously all-white surgical staff serving primarily African-American patients, the hospital in The Knick is an all-white surgical staff serving primarily white patients. While Edwards, active two decades prior to Wright, was not involved in broad-scale civil rights activism, the racial injustice he and others contended with is a major theme of the show. ==References==