The academic career that had begun with such difficulty was completed in triumph. Elizabeth Blackwell had gained the support of the students, faculty, and townspeople, and graduated first in her class. Her brother Henry, who attended the graduation ceremony held in the Presbyterian church in Geneva, described it in a letter to his family:.
Geneva, January 23d Beloved Relatives. By the time the procession came up, all the pews except those reserved for them were filled…. After a short discourse by Dr. In his graduation address to the medical class, Charles Lee, Dean of Geneva Medical College, referred to the extraordinary event of the day and declared his wholehearted admiration for the first female M.
The press, nationally and internationally, took notice of the first bestowal of a medical degree on a woman. Soon after graduation, Elizabeth left for England and Paris, hoping to supplement her Geneva education with study at the great hospitals of Europe.
There she found that her medical training gave her no status above that of the uneducated French village girls who were training to become midwives.
She next studied for several months study at St. The faculty, assuming that the all-male student body would never agree to a woman joining their ranks, allowed them to vote on her admission. As a joke, they voted "yes," and she gained admittance, despite the reluctance of most students and faculty.
Two years later, in , Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to receive an M. When Blackwell lost sight in one eye, she returned to New York City in , giving up her dream of becoming a surgeon. Elizabeth Blackwell established a practice in New York City, but had few patients and few opportunities for intellectual exchange with other physicians and "the means of increasing medical knowledge which dispensary practice affords.
In , with the help of friends, she opened her own dispensary in a single rented room, seeing patients three afternoons a week. The dispensary was incorporated in and moved to a small house she bought on 15th Street.
Her sister, Dr. Emily Blackwell, joined her in and, together with Dr. While he holds this opinion, he at the same time feels bound to say, that the inconveniences attending the admission of females to all the lectures in a medical school, are so great, that he will feel compelled on all future occasions, to oppose such a practice, although by so doing, he may be subjected to the charge of inconsistency.
From all we have been able to learn respecting Miss B. Exceptio probat Regulam. Why did these two authors, presumably each secure in the courage of conviction, feel the need to hide behind the veil of noms de plume? Opening Medicine to Women. In November of that year, while syringing the eyes of a child with purulent ophthalmia, she accidentally splashed her own eye and contracted the disease herself.
The resultant blindness of her left eye effectively precluded a career in surgery. Throughout her life, her self-control, perseverence, and optimism were remarkable. Progressive women of that era managed to survive and prosper professionally and personally in many different ways, e. Carey Thomas by her iron will, Susan B. Anthony by her unusual political alliances, Emily Blackwell by her keen administrative ability, Matilda Joslyn Gage by her absolute, almost fanatical devotion to liberty; but Elizabeth Blackwell seemed to do it by sheer optimism, her unshakable belief that everything would turn out all right in the end.
Her example inspired countless women, and she in turn was inspired by them. She left Paris to pursue postgraduate medical studies briefly at St. She became increasingly interested in social causes, especially those regarding the political and educational status of women.
Unable to overcome the prejudice against her, unable to establish herself in New York City either in private practice or as a hospital-affiliated physician, she resolved to found her own infirmary in New York City. After Dr. Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska and after Dr. Emily Blackwell helped her with this project. The result was her greatest achievement. Emily closed the school only after she was satisfied that Cornell University Medical College would give equal training to both sexes and after she had arranged for all of her students to transfer to Cornell.
After her doctoral dissertation on epidemic louse-borne typhus was published in the February issue of the Buffalo Medical Journal, Elizabeth Blackwell became a prolific author. In , when she was 33 and had already determined not to marry, she adopted Katharine Kitty Barry, a 7-year-old American orphan. From the late s until she finally settled in England in , Elizabeth Blackwell was back and forth across the Atlantic. One curious consequence of her seeking professional refuge in Europe was that, in addition to being the first woman doctor in America, she was also the first woman doctor in Great Britain.
In , largely through the influence of Sir James Paget, who had secured her internship at St. This was no mean feat.
Such listing is tantamount to being licensed to practice medicine in Great Britain. In the young British feminist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was inspired by meeting Blackwell to try to become the first woman to earn a medical degree in Britain.
She was refused admission by every British medical school but found a loophole in the British Society of Apothecaries regulations, sat for their qualifying examination, passed it in and thus became in the second woman in the British Medical Register. The Society of Apothecaries immediately changed its regulations specifically to bar women. In the American Civil War Elizabeth Blackwell, with guidance and support from Florence Nightingale, organized relief efforts, promoted sanitary services, and trained nurses.
She established a prosperous private practice in England in the s, helped to found the British National Health Society in , and held the Chair of Gynecology at the London School of Medicine for Women from until she retired in at the age of
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