Grief can have a profound impact on the trajectory of one’s life. It certainly did for Elizabeth Blackwell. As her best friend Mary lay on her deathbed, she took a 20-year-old Elizabeth’s hands in her own. She told her that she believed her suffering would have been much less if she had been treated by a female doctor—something unheard of at the time. Elizabeth took those sentiments to heart.
It all started in 1821, when Elizabeth was born to a Quaker family near Bristol. Rebelliousness ran in said family. Her father, Samuel Blackwell, was a well-known abolitionist activist, while her brother was an anti-slavery activist and famous women’s suffrage supporter. When she was 11, Elizabeth and her family crossed the pond and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. Shortly after, her father tragically passed away, leaving them in a tough financial situation.
Elizabeth, her mother, and her sister all got work as school teachers to make ends meet. And after the death of her friend Mary, Elizabeth, now a young woman, was determined to become a physician.
There was just one catch—med schools didn’t allow women. It was pretty much unheard of. But coming from a family of rebels, Liz wasn’t discouraged. While working as a teacher, she boarded with the families of two physicians who mentored her in medicine.
In 1847, she moved to Philadelphia and started applying to medical schools and received rejection after rejection. Then, Geneva Collage, a medical school in rural New York thought it would be funny to send her an acceptance letter as a practical joke. Joke’s on them, because she enrolled.
While in school, she she faced tons of discrimination. Professors excluded her from labs, male students laughed at her, and people in the community shunned her for not being a “proper woman.” Despite all of these obstacles, she won the respect of her professors and peers and graduated TOP OF HER CLASS and became the first female doctor in the United States. Eat that, patriarchy.
After graduating, she continued training in London and Paris hospitals, and eventually opened a small clinic for poor women in New York City in 1857, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. The hospital was staffed almost entirely by female doctors, and prided itself on offering positions to women. During the Civil War, Elizabeth trained nurses for the Union army. After the war she opened her own medical college in New York.
In 1869, she put her sister in charge of the college and returned to London permanently. There, she became a professor of gynecology at the London School of Medicine for Women, helped found the National Health Society, and published several books. Today, she remains an inspiration to all women daring to enter a male-dominated field ꩜