In 1821, David McDonogh was born into chattel slavery on a Louisiana plantation. His ‘owner’, John McDonogh, supported the American Colonization Society's mission to relocate freed African Americans to Liberia. Recognising David's exceptional intellect, John McDonogh arranged for him to attend Lafayette College in Pennsylvania in 1838, intending he become a missionary in West Africa. Upon arrival at Lafayette, he was made David a free man. At Lafayette, David discovered his passion for medicine whilst apprenticing with a local physician. Despite facing segregation in housing, meals, and instruction, he defied colonisation, declaring himself "decidedly, utterly, and radically" opposed to emigration. In 1844, David became Lafayette College's first African American graduate. Every New York medical school rejected him, but Dr John Kearney Rodgers, professor at Columbia University, became his ally. Though never formally admitted, David completed the full medical course. The institution refused to grant him a degree, yet his training prepared him to become America's first Black otolaryngologist. When Dr Rodgers died in 1850, David adopted the name "Kearney" to honour his mentor. Dr David Kearney McDonogh practised eye, ear, nose, and throat medicine at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary for 11 years, earning respect from the medical establishment. Beyond clinical work, he championed abolition through the Colored Conventions Movement, and in 1853 was elected to New York's Council of Colored Persons overseen by abolitionists leader, Frederick Douglass. In 1898, five years after his death, Black physicians opened McDonough Memorial Hospital, New York City's first hospital admitting physicians and patients regardless of race, in his honour. In 2018, Columbia University posthumously awarded Dr McDonogh the medical degree denied him 170 years earlier.