Diploma for medical degree for Dr. Ionia Rollin

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

Dr. Ionia Rollin Whipper was one of four female graduates of Howard University Medical School's class of 1903. After graduating, Whipper served as resident physician at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, before returning to Washington to open her own practice. In the 1920s, she toured the South instructing midwives as assistant medical officer for the Children's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. She later worked on the Maternity Ward of Freedmen's Hospital while continuing her private practice and mentoring pregnant teenage girls. In 1931, she opened the Ionia Rollin Whipper Home for Unwed Mothers in Northeast Washington, DC. Dr. Ionia Rollin's diploma for medical degree from Howard University in obstetrics. The diploma is extremly fragile and has multiple areas of loss and tears. The top of the diploma is covered in circular scroll work surrounding the text in Latin, [PROCURATORES / UNIVERSITATIS HOWARDIANEA / IN / Agro Columbine / Onibus has literas perlexturis sulutem in Domino sempiternam.] The text continues in a full paragraph in latin with the name [Ione Rollin Whipper] in larger, bolder lettering. The subject of the diploma has also been added in later, [Medicinea Doctoris]. On the bottom of the diploma are multiple signitures below, [Secretarius] and [Piases] that have completely faded and are now illegible.

Catalog date

1903

Recorded places

Washington, District of Columbia, United States, North and Central America

Recorded subjects

African American; Black Enterprise; Education; HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities); Medicine; Midwifery; Social reform; Women

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