A Pioneer in Pap Smears and Cancer Research

During her more than half century career, May Chinn, MD, MPH, advanced access to medical care for low-income residents in Harlem, with many of her contributions directly impacting healthcare for women and other disenfranchised populations.

Published March 19, 2025

By Brooke Elliott
Education Communications Intern

May Edward Chinn was the first woman to graduate from the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the first African American woman to intern at the Harlem Hospital, and the first woman of any race to ride with an ambulance crew. A trailblazer in cancer research and a member of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), she also helped to develop the pap smear test to detect cervical cancer in women. Much of her success can be attributed to her upbringing and her tenacity at a time when women in general and particularly of color weren’t always afforded the opportunity for a career in STEM

From Daughter of a Slave to Suffragette

Born in 1896 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, she moved to New York City at three years old. Her father, William Lafayette Chin, was a former slave who escaped from the Chinn plantation in Virginia in 1864 at eleven years old. May’s mother, Lulu Ann, was half African American and half Native American, and was raised on a Chickahominy reservation. When she was sixteen, she met the forty-year-old Chinn, and soon after the pair was married, they had their only child, May. 

Lulu’s hard work and resilience afforded May many educational opportunities. After contracting osteomyelitis in her lower right jaw, May left boarding school and lived on the estate of Charles Tiffany on the upper east side, where her mother was a live-in cook. The Tiffany family, the namesake for the prominent jewelry company, took her to Broadway shows on Sundays and inspired her with a lifelong appreciation for music.

When Charles died in 1902, the family left the estate and moved around the city for the next decade. Despite the lack of stability, Lulu always sought to make educational opportunities available to her daughter. Though May never received her high school diploma, a friend convinced her to take the entrance examination for the Teacher’s College at Columbia. Her outstanding score granted her admission as a full-time student. When William refused to pay her tuition, it was revealed that Lulu had started a savings fund. The family moved to Harlem so she could walk to her classes. 

It was at this time that May joined the growing suffragette movement, marching in parades and advocating for the Nineteenth Amendment. Once certified in 1920, this granted women the right to vote. 

The Harlem Renaissance

As a student at Columbia, May encountered many of the faces of the Harlem Renaissance. From Langston Hughes to Zora Neale Hurston, she was surrounded by prominent creatives, who often advocated for civil rights for African Americans. A musician herself, she often played the piano accompaniment to Paul Robeson, the esteemed musician and All-American football player from Rutgers.

Music was her first love, but her dreams of being a concert pianist were shattered when a professor at Columbia told her a Black woman could not be a serious musician. May changed her major to science, inspired by her childhood illness and the doctors who saved her life. At the time of her decision, only 65 Black women in the country were doctors.

May was the first African American woman to graduate from the Bellevue Hospital Medical College with a medical degree, earning her the title of “Doctor.” Despite these accomplishments, the primarily white, male doctors made her race and her gender an obstacle at every turn. 

Rockefeller Institute retracted a job offer after learning her race, but she soon found an internship at Harlem Hospital, where she was again the first Black woman to hold the position. There, she became “the first woman ever to ride the ambulance that raced out on emergency calls.”

Operating on Kitchen Tables

In 1928, Dr. Chinn opened her own practice at the Edgecombe Sanatorium. The male doctors of Harlem were soon taking advantage of her commitment to the Hippocratic Oath, sending their own families to receive her medical care while actively taking away paying clients. With time, though, word of her excellence spread.

She found private patients among the white people she had previously attended at Harlem Hospital. Harlem was also home to a colony of Mohawk American Indians. The women of the tribe went to May to mix their tribal remedies with her modern medicine.

She attended everyone from nuns to prostitutes, never turning away a patient and putting her own life at risk to help those who needed it most. Dr. Chinn always kept a firearm on her while attending to patients. “Because black doctors were barred from private hospitals, Dr. Chinn often had to perform major operations in her patients’ homes, with a bed or an ironing board as an operating table,” according to a 1979 feature in The New York Times.

A Pioneer in Pap Smears

While attending Columbia for a second time to get her master’s in public health, Dr. Chinn set her sights on cancer research. Her parents passed away in the late 1930s, leading her to devote all her energies to the disease, at times sneaking into Memorial Hospital to conduct her research. In 1944 she was offered a staff position at Strang Clinic, one of the top facilities in the country for detecting cancer at its earliest stages. Dr. Chinn worked at the clinic for 26 years until her retirement in 1974. 

At the Strang Clinic, Chinn worked with George Papanicolaou, the creator of the cervical cancer screening known as the Pap Smear. Dr. Chinn also conducted research into how family history can be connected with cancer probability predictions. She became a member of the Academy in 1954.

She was referenced by the New York City Cancer Committee of the American Cancer Society in 1957. May was also awarded an honorary doctorate of science from NYU, as well as an honorary doctorate from Columbia University, in 1980. She also helped to found the Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Fund. 

Though she never married, May was engaged several times throughout her life, and was godmother to 19 children. One of her many godchildren was Franklin H. William, former United States Ambassador to Ghana and President of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. In 1979, he appointed the 82-year-old as medical consultant to a hundred refugees from southern Africa who were in the United States for college. She passed away on December 1st, 1980, at the age of 84. Perhaps a testament to her career of selflessness, she passed away while attending a reception for a friend at Columbia University.

Also read: Leading the Fight Against Tuberculosis and Syphilis

This is part of a series of articles featuring past Academy members across all eras.