Millie Gibson Hale

Millie E. Gibson Hale and John Henry Hale were the ultimate power couple, who devoted their lives together to using that power to advance justice and healing.

Millie Essie Gibson was born in Nashville in 1881. Her father was a blacksmith, and both parents were leaders in Nashville’s Black community. Millie attended Pearl Elementary School and Fisk University’s Normal School, then obtained a nursing degree at the Lincoln School for Nurses, the first school in New York City to train Black nurses. She returned to Nashville where she married John Henry Hale in 1905.

John Henry Hale was born in Estill Springs, Tennessee in 1878 and moved to Nashville to attend Central Tennessee College. The college was renamed Walden University by the time he graduated in 1901, and he continued at the school’s medical department (which would later become Meharry Medical College). Shortly after he obtained his medical degree in 1905, he married Millie Gibson. He traveled to the Mayo Clinic and other medical centers in the North to study surgery.

Dr. and Ms. Hale then embarked on extraordinary careers of public service. In 1915, they founded the Millie E. Hale Hospital in their home at 523 7th Avenue, South, near the present site of the Union Rescue Mission. At a time when White hospitals refused to treat Black patients, there was no full time hospital available to the third of Nashvillians who were Black. (Walden University’s Medical Department operated what would become known as Hubbard Hospital, but it sometimes closed during the university’s summer recess.) The Millie E. Hale Hospital, which initially had 14 beds, provided a full-time hospital that by 1920 had grown to 75 beds. At a time when women were allowed few professional leadership roles, it is significant that the hospital bore Ms. Hale’s name. She was the hospital’s superintendent, while Dr. Hale served as surgeon-in-chief. After Ms. Hale’s premature death in 1930, Dr. Hale maintained the hospital in her name until it was absorbed into Hubbard Hospital in 1938. Dr. Hale would become the Chief of Surgery at Meharry and perform 30,000 surgeries over his career.

The Hales did not limit their community service to health care. They established a community center and a children’s park, at a time when the city’s public facilities were closed to Black residents. At a time when there was no public assistance, they provided food and coal to thousands of destitute Nashvillians.

Dr. Hale served as the national president of the National Medical Association and helped train Black doctors who treated patients throughout the Jim Crow South. The United States Public Health Service posthumously awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal for his outstanding contribution to the Negro medical profession.”