Jessie Gideon Garnett

Jessie Gideon Garnett was the first Black woman to earn a medical degree from Tufts School of Dental Medicine. Born in Nova Scotia in 1897, Gideon Garnett moved to Boston with her widowed mother and siblings when she was eleven years old. Although her mother was a seamstress, Gideon Garnett was drawn to dentistry from an early age after she watched her older sisters study nursing.

As a graduate of both Tufts College and Tufts School of Dental Medicine, Gideon Garnett was one of the most respected Black medical professionals in New England. She opened her first dental practice at 795 Tremont Street in the South End. Her husband, Robert Charles Garnett, was one of Boston’s first Black police officers. Because of racial discrimination at Boston’s hospitals and dental facilities, city officials paid Gideon Garnett to use her house as a convalescent home and rehabilitation center for Black citizens. Gideon Garnett’s work as a dentist, and her agreement with the city, meant that as many as sixteen patients convalesced at her Roxbury home as they recovered from surgeries and other medical procedures performed at local hospitals.

Although arthritis forced her to retire in 1969, Gideon Garnett was a local community leader in Roxbury and Boston’s South End. A founding member of Psi Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest Black sorority in the United States, Gideon Garnett also supported Boston’s Freedom House, the local NAACP, the Boston YMCA, and St. Mark’s Congregational Church. She died in Boston in 1976.