Nathan Mossell was born in Hamilton, Canada in 1856, the fourth of six children. Both his parents, Eliza Bowers and Aaron Albert Mossell I, were descended from freed slaves. According to Mossell's autobiography, his mother's stories of the discrimination and hardship their families faced strengthened her own children's determination to succeed. Mossell's maternal grandfather had resisted all attempts by his owner to make him work and was eventually freed. He married and settled in Baltimore, but the entire family, including Mossell's mother, who was a child at the time, were deported to Trinidad. Mossell's paternal grandfather, who had been transported from the coast of West Africa, managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife. He too settled in Baltimore, where Mossell's father was born. Nathan Mossell's parents met and married in Baltimore after his mother's family return from Trinidad. His father learned the brickmaking trade and saved enough money to buy a house. After the birth of their third child, the couple decided to move to Canada, as free blacks were prohibited from being educated in Maryland and they wanted education for their children. They sold their house in Baltimore and settled in Hamilton, Ontario. His father bought a tract of clay-bearing land and set up his own brickworks. Nathan's siblings were the following:
During the Civil War, the family moved back to the United States, settling in Lockport, New York, where Mossell's father again owned his own brickmaking business. Along with his siblings, Mossell attended the local public school in Lockport. His schooling became erratic once he started working part-time at age nine for his father. He eventually joined his elder brother Charles at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, where he studied Natural Science, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1879.
Later life and medical career
Mossell went on to study at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, becoming its first African-American graduate in 1882. He did post-graduate training at hospitals in Philadelphia, including the Pennsylvania University Hospital, and later at Guy's Hospital, Queen's Hospital, and St Thomas' Hospital in London. After his return to the United States, in 1888 Mossell became the first black physician elected as member of the Philadelphia County Medical Society. That year he also started his private practice. In 1895, he helped found the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School in West Philadelphia, serving as its chief-of-staff and medical director until his retirement in 1933.
After retiring as director of the hospital in 1933, Mossell continued to work in his private practice, which he had opened in 1888. He died on October 27, 1946 in Philadelphia at the age of 90. He was believed to be the oldest practicing black physician at the time of his death.
