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Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. brought about revolutionary change as the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, circa 1875-1885 |
Elizabeth Blackwell was born on 3 Feb 1821 and baptized 23 Oct 1825 in Bristol, England, United Kingdom.[1] She was the 3rd of the nine children (who lived to adulthood) of Samuel Blackwell, a sugar refiner, and Hannah Lane, who immigrated to the United States from Bristol in 1832.[2] The family first settled In New York, then in 1838 moved to Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, where her father died soon afterwards when she was 17.
She was home-schooled for much of her early education and only attended public school when the family first lived in New York.[3] To help support the family, Elizabeth and her two older sisters opened a school for girls, to add to her brother's income from his job in the mayor's office. The sisters ran the school until 1842, after which Elizabeth continued to teach privately.[3] She taught for three years at a school for girls in Henderson in Kentucky, a slave state, which was eye-opening to a young woman raised in a family of abolitionists and non-conformists.[3]
Elizabeth credits the idea to study medicine from the suggestion of a friend dying of a "delicate malady."[3] After many refusals due to her gender, she was finally accepted at Geneva Medical College in Geneva, Ontario County, New York. Inititally viewed as an eccentric by some fellow students, townspeople and friends, she kept largely to herself. During the summer break, she worked for the Guardians of the Poor, a hospital and poorhouse in West Philadelphia, where she faced the prejudice of male physicians, a recurring theme throughout her career.
On 23 Jan 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to receive an M.D. degree from an American medical school. She became a celebrity for her accomplishment, viewed with both admiration and scorn. After she finished medical school, she gained experience working for clinics in London and Paris for two years. She studied midwifery at La Maternité, France's largest public maternity hospital, where she contracted "purulent opthalmia" from a young patient. When Elizabeth lost sight in one eye, it was removed and replaced with a glass eye. She returned to New York City in 1851, giving up her dream of becoming a surgeon.[4]
Elizabeth opened up a practice in New York City, but in terms of patient numbers, it wasn't initially successful. She and her sister Emily Blackwell, who earned her M.D. in 1854, founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in 1857, along with a young German doctor, Marie Zakrzewska, her protégé. As time passed, patient numbers increased, and the institution began to train nurses as well.
During the U.S. Civil War, male physicians from the United States Sanitary Commission threatened to withdraw support from a nurse education plan if Elizabeth, as a woman physician, had anything to do with it. The New York Infirmary went ahead with the training facilities available for nurses with the help of the activist, Dorothea Dix, and trained women to be nurses for the Union Army. In 1868, she and her sister Emily founded the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary.[5]
In July 1869 Elizabeth returned to England for good, where she helped found the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. She co-founded the National Health Society (1871) and promoted social reform subjects close to her heart such as sexual purity, moral reform, women’s rights, preventive medicine, eugenics and medical education in several reform establishments. She believed Christian morality had an important role in medicine and that disease was often borne due to moral impurity. This led her at times to consider spiritual healing as an effective treatment.
She campaigned against prostitution, contraceptives and also against the Contagious Disease Act (1864), which permitted police officers to arrest prostitutes operating in ports and small towns. They would then be checked for sexually transmitted disease, and if infected, would be imprisoned in a hospital which specialized in dealing with these type of patients.
Elizabeth was conservative, but differed with many women of the time, by stating she thought men and women have the same sentiments about sex, and it was up to both to control the outcome. Many women of that era believed that women did not have sentiments towards sex but that it was the task of the woman to instill the moral necessities for society.
She never married and continued with her career late into her life. In 1895 she published her memoir, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, which sold only 500 copies.
Many published biographies of Elizabeth Blackwell are illustrated with photographs of attractive young women who are identified as her, but have been determined, or are suspected, to be someone else. See the page Photos Claimed to be Elizabeth Blackwell.
Elizabeth, aged 89, died on 31 May 1910 at home in Rock House, her cottage in Hastings, East Sussex, on the south coast of England, which she shared with her sisters, Anna and Marian. She was buried in the graveyard of St. Munn’s Parish Church in the small lochside village of Kilmun, Scotland. [6]
[The Elizabeth Blackwell Medal] was established in her honor in 1949, 100 years after Elizabeth received her medical degree. It is awarded by the American Medical Women's Association, each year to a female physician "who has made the most outstanding contributions to the cause of women in the field of medicine."
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