Alexander T. Augusta is among 13 known African Americans that served as surgeons during the American Civil War. A native Virginian, Augusta traveled to Canada to study medicine and achieve his degree.
Following his request to President Lincoln, Dr. Alexander Augusta was the first commissioned medical officer in the Union Army. Augusta would later become the first Black surgeon to lead a hospital in the U.S., leading the contraband camp in Washington, D.C. from May through October 1863.
Augusta was also the first African American to serve on the faculty of a medical school in the United States, serving, at the time, the newly established medical department of Howard University in 1868.
Read more: https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2014/04/04/a-civil-war-surgeons-books-rediscovered/