Elizabeth Blackwell is credited as the first female doctor
in the United States.
She pioneered women's study of medicine and was a leader in the emerging
women's rights movement.
Early Life
Elizabeth Blackwell was born on February 3, 1821 in Bristol, England.
The Blackwell family consisted of Quakers who believed that men and women were
the same under the eyes of God. Because of this belief, Elizabeth's father Samuel made sure that both
his sons and his daughters received an education.
During her youth, Elizabeth Blackwell lost six of her
sisters and two of her brothers. After a fire destroyed her father's sugar
refinery, the family immigrated to the United States in 1832. Initially,
the family settled in New York City.
.But when an opportunity to open a refinery in Ohio
without the use of slave labor was presented, Samuel Blackwell (an abolitionist)
moved his family to Cincinnati.
Three months after the move, Elizabeth Blackwell's father
died of biliary fever.
Choosing a Direction
After her father's death, Elizabeth Blackwell obtained a
teaching position in Kentucky.
She found teaching unpleasant, but her goal was to make money to attend medical
school.
In her memoirs, Blackwell admits that she didn't always want
to be a physician. In fact, she explained that she "hated everything connected
with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book." Academically,
her favorite academic subjects were history and metaphysics. "The very thought
of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments",
Blackwell wrote, "filled me with disgust." Yet she later turned to
medicine after a close friend who was dying suggested that a woman doctor would
have spared her the worst of her suffering.
Pioneering
Blackwell's friends approved of her desire to study
medicine, but Elizabeth
was also told that doing so would be impossible since such an education wasn't
available to women. Unafraid of a challenge, Blackwell then asked two friends
if she could study medicine with them for a year. Meanwhile, she applied to
medical schools in the northeastern United States.
Elizabeth Blackwell was accepted into the Geneva Medical
College in western New York in 1847, after the decision had
been put to a student vote. Many students who voted on her admission allowed it
because they thought her application was a joke. After enduring some prejudice
from both peers and professors, Blackwell became the first woman to graduate
with a medical degree in the United
States on January 23, 1849.
Unexpected Trouble
After graduation, Blackwell worked at clinics in London and Paris
for two years. She also learned midwifery at la Maternité, where she contracted
purulent opthalmia – an inflammation of the eye - from a young patient. When Elizabeth
Blackwell's inflamed eye was replaced with a glass one, she returned to New York City thinking that
she'd have to give up her dream of becoming a surgeon.
The New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and
Children
In 1857, Elizabeth Blackwell, along with her sister Emily
and colleague Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent
Women and Children. During the American Civil War, Blackwell trained many women
to become nurses and sent them to work for the Union Army. She stressed the
importance of sanitation and hygiene in preventing diseases.
In 1869, Blackwell left her sister Emily in charge of the
College and returned to England.
She teamed with Florence Nightingale to open the Women's Medical College.
She also became a chairperson in gynecology at the London School of Medicine
for Women, but retired after a year.
Throughout her retirement, Blackwell continued to write about
the importance of education for both sexes. She also published books on disease
and proper hygiene.
In 1907, Elizabeth Blackwell was injured in a fall from
which she never fully recovered She died on May 31, 1910 in her home in Hastings in Sussex.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Blackwell_(doctor)
http://greatwomen.org/women.php?action=viewone&id=20
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_35.html
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