Later Years
Mustering out of the service on October 1866, Augusta accepted an assignment with the Freedman's Bureau, heading the agency's Lincoln Hospital in Savannah, Georgia. While there, he encouraged African American self-help, urged the freedmen to support independent institutions, and gained respect from the city's white physicians.
Augusta returned to private practice in Washington, D.C. He was attending surgeon to the Smallpox Hospital in Washington in 1870. He also served on the staff of the local Freedman's Hospital. Augusta taught anatomy in the recently organized medical department at Howard University from November 8, 1868 to July 1877, becoming the first African American appointed faculty of the school and also of any medical college in the U.S. He had received honorary degrees of M.D. in 1869 and A.M. in 1871 from Howard.
Despite his accomplishments, he was repeatedly refused entry to the local society of physicians, an affront that he feared would impede the progress of younger African American physicians in the city. He died in Washington on December 21, 1890, interred with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery he is buried in Section 1, Lot 124A, map grid G/33.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Thomas Augusta
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The discovery of Pennsylvania’s coal and iron was the deathblow to Allaire. The works were moved to Pennsylvania so hurriedly that for years pianos and the larger pieces of furniture stood in the deserted houses.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)