Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered? JEREMIAH 8:22

Another “spiritual” that owes its origin to Richard Allen’s 1801 hymnal: A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors by Richard Allen, African Minister (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1801) is 'There is a balm in Gilead'. This spiritual was inspired by the John Newton hymn: How lost was my condition

. From <https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/there-is-a-balm-in-gilead

The African worshipers took the alliteration sin-sick soul that was sung in Allens church from Newton's hymn and incorporated in Allen's emotional preaching and integrated them into their song. The result is an entirely new song with its own form and music.

By the 1830s the chorus circulated in oral tradition proven by its inclusion in Newton’s Hymn as Eileen Southern calls “Wandering Choruses”

“...that is, refrains freely used with any hymn rather than affixed permanently to specific hymns.” From <http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/hymnals-of-the-black-church--eileen-southern.aspx

1 How lost was my condition,

Till Jesus made me whole,

There is but one Physician

Can cure a sin-sick soul.

Chorus:

There is a balm in Gilead,

To make the wounded whole,

There's pow'r enough in Jesus,

To cure a sin-sick soul.

It stands to reason that these early sources, via unknown avenues over the course of 30+ years had been cycled through oral tradition among African Americans in the 1800s. In one snippet of what could be a variant of this spiritual, a graduate of Hampton University, Dennis F. Douglas, class of 1876, wrote to the school’s journal, The Southern Workman, speaking of his experience teaching in South Carolina and Georgia, and said, “Our folks sing a song running like this, ‘Though I cannot sing like Silas, neither can I preach like Paul, I can tell the wondrous story; free salvation is for all” (vol. 25, p. 196).

From <https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/there-is-a-balm-in-gilead>

 By 1845 it is alluded to by Edgar Allan Poe in his narrative poem The Raven. 

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—

On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—

Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

From <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven>

By 1854 it is published in Washington Glass's 1854 hymn "The Sinner's Cure,"…  

Glass attributed this hymn to himself, but like several of the hymns so attributed, it is substantially the work of another. From <http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/balm-in-gilead--1854-version-a-sinners-cure.aspx

Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Hymn And Tune Book of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Round note ed. Nashville, Tenn.: Pub. House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Barbee & Smith agents, 18991889.

Around the turn of the 20^th century, it was published in John Wesley Work, Folk Song of the American Negro (New York: Negro University Press, 1915), 102. 

It was immortalized in William L. Dawson’s haunting and beautiful arrangement. 

Tuskegee Institute, Ala.: Music Press, ©1949

Dr., Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Said: 

Centuries ago Jeremiah raised a question, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”   He raised it because he saw the good people suffering so often and the evil people prospering.

 Our fore-parents… did an amazing thing.   They looked back across the centuries and they took Jeremiah’s question mark and straightened it into an exclamation point.   And they could sing, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. (Yes)   There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”