You may have heard of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to get a medical degree, but this new release has a lot of information that was new to me, and which I’m excited to share with you.
Elizabeth was the third of nine children in her family to survive infancy, and the family’s intellectual and opinionated ways combined with their father’s habit of moving them (from England to New York to Cincinnati) meant that the family were each other’s closest friends. They were well-educated and politically active in the abolitionist movement. None of the five daughters ever married, and two of the sons married prominent suffragists of the era.
Still, it was unprecedented for even an ambitious daughter to attend a medical college. When driven, serious Elizabeth applied, she received a string of rejections from men who found the idea of a woman doctor absurd; even her eventual acceptance to Geneva Medical College was due at least in part to a belief on the part of the current student body that the application was a prank. Despite often being met with discouragement and loneliness, Elizabeth got her education and training, and eventually encouraged her younger sister Emily to do the same, whereupon they opened a clinic together which was staffed entirely by women.
It would be a mistake to ascribe too much progressivism to her motivations. Although she was a trailblazer, Elizabeth could be very traditional about a woman’s place and was ambivalent about women’s suffrage. She was hesitant about the safety of vaccines and other medical innovations of her time. She knew Florence Nightingale and disapproved of her focus on nursing. But she made incredible strides in women’s representation in the medical field, and for the comfort of gynecological patients who found it emotionally difficult to be treated by men.
Author Janice Nimura has done a wonderful job evoking the time in which the Blackwells lived and their characters, complex as they were. The library has print copies and an ebook on OverDrive.
