The history of African-American physicians in Brooklyn in most easily traced to the period shortly before the Civil War. Although there may have been practitioners in the borough of Kings before this time, precious little is known of them.

Dr. James McCune Smith was born in Manhattan and received his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Glasgow. He began his practice in Manhattan in 1837 at the age of 28, opening two drug stores. He was reportedly known as a very skilled physician and pharmacist, and served as an attending at the Manhattan Colored Orphan Asylum. Subsequently, as a Brooklyn resident, Dr. Smith became a noted abolitionist, orator and journalist. He wrote the preface to Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom. Following the Draft Riots of 1863, Dr Smith moved his practice to Williamsburg. He died in 1865.

Dr. Peter William Ray bridges the span between the Civil War era and the early part of the 20th Century. A graduate of Bowdoin College and protege of Dr James McCune Smith, Dr. Ray practiced in Williamsburg in the 1850's, doing mainly obstetrics and pediatrics. He was the first Black member of the Kings County Medical Society and was one of the co-founders of the now defunct Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, formerly located on Lafayette Street in the Bedford- Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. As a social activist, he organized the Colored Political Associates of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County and was also a co-founder of the Provident Clinical Society, in 1905.

Susan Smith McKinney(Stewart) was the first Black woman to practice in Brooklyn and the third to practice in the United States. Born in 1847 to Sylvanus and Anne Smith on what was then a Weeksville farm, that area is now at the corners of Fulton Street and Buffalo Avenue. Her mother was of mixed heritage, being the daughter of a French officer and a Shinnecock woman. A graduate of the New York Medical College for Women in 1870, Smith would go on to have a distinguished career. Among her accomplishments were a successful practice at 205 DeKalb Avenue in Fort Greene, involvement in the womens' suffrage movement, the African- American Brooklyn Literary Union, a musician with the Bridge Street A.M.E. Church, as well as being an associate of W.E.B. DuBois. As a physician, Smith McKinney Stewart was one of the founders of the Homeopathic Hospital, later the Memorial Hospital for Women and Children then at 808 Prospect Place. She was the doctor of record at the Brooklyn Home for the Aged Colored People at St. Johns Place and Kingston Avenue, and one of the early Black members of the Kings County and New York Homeopathic Medical Societies. Du Bois eulogized her upon her death in 1919.

Other known physicians of that era included Dr. Thomas J. White, the first Black member of the Board of Education. Dr. George A. Phillips was a pharmacist and practiced for nearly 50 years according to one source. There was a Dr. Gloucester who lived and practiced in the late 1880's, near what is today the Fulton Mall, on Duffield and Willoughby Streets in downtown Brooklyn.

In 1890 two other physicians, a husband and wife, were added to the role of African-American doctors, when Walter A. Morton and Verina Harris Morton set up practice in separate locations. Following her graduation from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1886, Verina become the first woman to practice in the state of Mississippi. She later moved to Brooklyn, where she married Walter, a graduate of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Walter died in 1894, as did their daughter, and Verina left Brooklyn grief-striken. She later returned to the borough and reestablished a practice, remarrying in 1901. In a few short years she would become a Provident co-founder.