McKane, Cornelius

Impact on the world

Descended from a Liberian king whose own daughter had been sold into slavery generations earlier, McKane fulfilled a promise to his grandmother to return to Africa as a physician, co-founding the first hospital in Monrovia, Liberia with his wife Alice Woodby McKane in 1895, after earlier co-founding the first nursing school for Black students in Southeast Georgia in 1893.

Life & background

Born in Georgetown, British Guiana, McKane was the great-grandson of King Mannah Funacai, a ruler of the Vai and Dey peoples in what is now Liberia, whose own daughter had been sold into slavery generations before McKane's birth. Arriving in the United States alone and penniless at 18, he was taken in by a Baptist deacon who helped him get a basic education, after which he returned to Liberia to study native languages and Arabic, working as a school principal before resolving to become a physician and fulfill a promise to his grandmother that he would return to help his people. He earned his medical degree from the University of Vermont and Dartmouth, then began practicing in Savannah, Georgia in 1892, where he met and married fellow physician Alice Woodby McKane, with whom he co-founded the McKane Training School for Nurses in 1893 and, after relocating to Monrovia in 1895, the first hospital in Liberia's history. The family returned to Savannah in 1896 after Alice contracted African fever and their infant daughter died, where the couple founded the McKane Hospital for Women and Children, before relocating to Boston in 1909 for better educational opportunities for their surviving children; McKane died there in 1912.

Sources

1. Georgia Historical Society; BADA History