08/30/2026
Not all medical discoveries are created in a lab.
In 1918, influenza was tearing through America. In rural Pitt County, North Carolina, a Black woman barely 21 years old was carrying homemade tea to sick people, using plants she had learned to recognize along the Tar River since childhood.
She had no clinic and no prescription pad. Her parents had been enslaved, and much of what she knew about healing existed far outside the medical institutions of her time.
Still, people trusted her. Around her home she grew sassafras, white mint, tansy, mullein and other plants she used in traditional remedies.
Her best-known preparation was a nine-herb tonic. She poured it into whatever containers she had, including old vinegar, mayonnaise and pickle jars.
She did not charge people for what she made. Decades later, the same knowledge that had lived in her yard and in her memory would draw the attention of a medical school.
In 1979, sixty-one years after she carried tea to people during the influenza pandemic, East Carolina University’s School of Medicine made a 40-minute film about her knowledge. The woman people had called “Little Medicine Thing” since childhood was now being recorded so medical students could learn from her.
Her name was Emma Dupree. For much of her life, an ordinary yard in eastern North Carolina became the place where neighbors came looking for help.
Dupree was born in 1897 near Falkland, North Carolina, and grew up along the Tar River. She came of age under Jim Crow, when segregation shaped daily life for Black North Carolinians, including their access to hospitals and medical care.
That inequality could be especially harsh in rural communities. By 1940, North Carolina had only 13 African American hospitals, and regular professional medical care remained difficult for many Black families in the countryside to reach.
Dupree had begun learning about plants long before anyone from a university arrived with a camera. As a girl, she wandered through woods and along riverbanks gathering plants, becoming so closely identified with healing that people began calling her “Little Medicine Thing.”
She carried that knowledge with her when she later lived in Fountain, a small town in Pitt County. Around her house grew rabbit to***co, maypop, sassafras, mint, mullein, catnip, tansy and other plants she knew by sight and use.
There was no waiting room and no appointment book. Friends and neighbors simply came to her home, and accounts of her life say she even mailed herbs to people who lived farther away.
Her preparations often ended up in jars and jugs that had once held ordinary food. There were no printed instructions on the side, so Dupree would explain how she believed each remedy should be used.
She was not doing it to make money. State records say she did not charge for her traditional medicines, although people sometimes brought her honey, molasses or other things she could use.
In a place where professional medical care was not always easy for Black families to reach, that kind of knowledge mattered. Dupree’s standing in the community came from years of experience and from the people who kept returning to her door.
Then, late in her life, something changed. Doctors, researchers and medical anthropologists began coming to listen to the elderly Black woman whose knowledge had been learned outside classrooms, hospitals and laboratories.
In 1979, East Carolina University’s School of Medicine filmed Dupree talking about the plants she knew and the ways she used them. The resulting documentary, “Little Medicine Thing: Emma Dupree, Herbalist,” ran for about 40 minutes and became part of the university’s medical curriculum.
The contrast is hard to miss. In 1918, she had been carrying homemade tea through a segregated North Carolina community, and six decades later a medical school was preserving her words for its students.
Recognition came while she was still alive. The North Carolina Folklore Society gave her the Brown-Hudson Award in 1984, and in 1992 she received the North Carolina Heritage Award for her contribution to the state’s traditional culture.
Dupree died in 1996, only months before her 99th birthday. More than a quarter century later, Fountain placed a historical marker near where she had lived, remembering the woman whose remedies had once traveled quietly from her garden into her neighbors’ homes.
And one of the clearest pieces of her legacy is still preserved in an archive. The 1979 film remains a record of the moment when knowledge carried for decades in Emma Dupree’s hands, memory and garden entered the records of a medical school.
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