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 | People Doing Science: The First Woman Doctor (Grades 9-12) |
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Elizabeth Blackwell: The First Woman Doctor
Rachel Speigel
To be the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell had to be brilliant, diplomatic, tenacious, and tough as nails.
Portrait of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell was accepted at only one medical school, and her acceptance there was a fluke. The administrators of Geneva Medical College of New York did not want to risk rejecting a woman applicant, so they asked the medical students whether to approve the application. The students thought that a rival school had submitted the application as a joke and voted to admit this unlikely candidate. That was the year 1848.
Elizabeth Blackwell eventually became the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. In her time, women could not vote or hold political office, and it was extremely difficult and uncommon for them to attend college or have professions. Women were accused of being less intelligent than men and too emotionally unstable and too physically weak to withstand the rigors of a medical education. But Blackwell proved the accusers wrong. At Geneva, she took all the classes her male classmates took, including anatomy and physiology lectures, and she dissected male cadavers, which was considered outrageous behavior for a woman of the Victorian era.
Blackwell graduated from medical school at the head of her class. Yet, at her graduation, the speaker mentioned the significance of her achievement but never said her name. It was years before Geneva accepted another woman.
A woman dissects the leg of a cadaver
Blackwell graduated from medical school at the head of her class. Yet, at her graduation, the speaker mentioned the significance of her achievement but never said her name. It was years before Geneva accepted another woman.
Despite Blackwell's accomplishment, her younger sister Emily went through much the same ordeal. Emily was not accepted to Geneva Medical College, and although she successfully completed her initial courses at Rush Medical School, she was then turned away under pressure from local physicians in Chicago. She transferred to Case Western Reserve University where she completed her medical studies.
Elizabeth Blackwell was especially interested in women's health. She went to Paris to get clinical experience in the care and treatment of women (a field called gynecology) especially during pregnancy and childbirth (a field called obstetrics).
But when she returned to the United States, Blackwell could not get a job. So she and her sister banded together with a colleague, Dr. Marie Zakrewska, and formed the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. This was the first American hospital devoted to women's health and staffed entirely by women. Blackwell believed that women's gentle, sympathetic dispositions and maternal instincts made them natural healers.
The operating room at the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital for Women and Children, 1898. The physician, the nurses, and the anesthetist are all women
Blackwell was one of the more progressive doctors in the nineteenth century. She learned from scientific developments in bacteriology and pathology that cleanliness was crucial for preventing illness. While the three doctors at the New York Infirmary were waiting for patients to come to their clinic, Blackwell wrote a number of lectures outlining the principles of good hygiene. In her lectures and in her books, she expressed the importance of preventing diseases as well as treating them. "Certain physical and mental conditions are essential to...health," wrote Blackwell. "Hence, questions of food and clothing, of drainage and ventilation, of human habitations, of exercise and occupations, attain equal importance and dignity, as essential to the fulfillment of the great changeless plan of life (1)."
Blackwell realized that it would take laws and education to create a healthier society; her approach was holistic and far ahead of its time. "The health of a nation is a most important concern of a wise government," she said in a lecture that she gave in 1869 (2).
Florence Nightingale tends to patients during the Civil War
Blackwell also worked with Florence Nightingale to select and train nurses for duty in the Civil War. Blackwell and Nightingale helped establish the United States Sanitary Commission in 1861, an organization that improved soldiers' conditions in military hospitals and enforced better diet and hygiene for the troops.
By the late 1860s, the Blackwells were not only doing medicine but also teaching it. They founded the Women's Medical College in New York City where women could have medical educations of the highest quality. Hygiene was a key component of the curriculum and became a separate department at the college. (The Women's Medical College closed in 1899 when Cornell University Medical School began to admit women.)
Blackwell was a remarkable person who helped make it possible for women to become doctors. She was tough from the start: as a child, she slept on the bare floor to "harden" her body. Several medical school rejection letters proposed that she disguise herself in men's clothing in order to enroll. But for Blackwell that was unthinkable. Her goal of becoming a doctor was "a moral crusade...a course of justice...[that] must be pursued in the light of day (3)." Today, at many of the top medical schools in the country, nearly half of the students are women.
All pictures are courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.
References
1. The Religion of Health, a Lecture, Elizabeth Blackwell,1869, Partridge Press, 6-7.
2. The Religion of Health, a Lecture, Elizabeth Blackwell,1869, Partridge Press, 16.
3. Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, Elizabeth Blackwell, 1870, Partridge Press. |
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