Honoring Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, for Women’s History Month
Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, on February 3, 1821. She became one of the first women physicians in the United States. Her interest to become a physician developed after she painfully experienced the death of her female friend who did not have a female doctor well-versed with women’s issues.
Her journey in “providing healing and promoting hope” for women began. Elizabeth persisted in applying to various medical schools as her applications were rejected because she was a woman. Geneva College accepted her application though the administration thought it was a “joke” that a woman applied in 1847.
She advocated for herself to be treated as her equal to her male colleagues when participating in the Reproductive Anatomy class, which made the male students uncomfortable. Furthermore, by her attentive and thorough note-taking skills, Miss Blackwell proved she was able to understand the information being presented in her courses.
During her Spring and Summer breaks from medical school, Elizabeth observed how the poorest of the poor and the insane were treated at the Blockney Almshouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the male physicians wanted nothing to do with her because she was a woman.
Dr.Blackwell wrote her thesis, “Ship Fever,” (Typhus) based upon the Irish Immigrants who were severely ill on the ships coming from Ireland to America. It was published in the Buffalo Medical Journal in February 1849, and Miss Blackwell graduated with her medical degree a few months later.
In 1850, Dr. Blackwell struggled to find a position in hospitals and in health centers with her male counterparts because she was a “Woman”. She began studying under Sir James Paget at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London after her cousin helped obtain this opportunity. She started a friendship with activists Baroness Anne Isabella Noel Byron (Lady Byron), and Barbara Leigh Smith, and also met Florence Nightingale, who was fighting for medial reform in England.
In 1857, she opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, a fully- operational hospital with beds for medical and surgical patients. Its purpose was not only to serve the poor, but also to provide positions and opportunities for women physicians and a training facility for female medical and nursing students. Elizabeth’s sister, Drs. Emily Blackwell and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska worked alongside with her in New York City. Furthermore, her hospital was renamed as New York University downtown hospital in the present era.
Dr. Blackwell believed that women should receive their medical education alongside men in the established medical schools. She was not sympathetic to the women’s medical schools that had opened in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York in the 1850s. However, since the women trained in her Infirmary were not able to gain admission to the male medical colleges, she thought deeply of developing her own women’s medical college.
During the Civil War, Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell helped organize the Women’s Central Association of Relief, selecting and training nurses for service in the war. Furthermore, their mission to promote healing inspired the creation of the United States Sanitary Commission in which both of them worked for this organization.
Miss Blackwell’s dream to open a Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary became a reality in 1868, as the New York State Legislature granted her a charter to do so. Miss Blackwell believed firmly that it was one thing to open a poor college with charity, but more important to open a great college for women medical students that would provide professional skills, hospital practice, and the introduction of hygiene. The Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary opened its doors in 1868, with fifteen students and a faculty of nine, including Elizabeth, as Professor of Hygiene, and her younger sister Emily as Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women. At the college, female medical students engaged in a progressive succession of studies, for four years, the first of its kind for medical training for women. One of their first black graduates was Rebecca Cole.
The year after the College’s opening, Elizabeth left for England, leaving the College under Emily’s directorship.
In 1874, Dr. Blackwell helped in opening the London School of Medicine for Women along with Sophia Jex-Black and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson where she lectured on gynecology to the female students. Dr. Blackwell published her autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, in 1895 before her death in 1910.
After a series of mergers, the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary became part of today’s New York Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital.
Subsequently, in 1896, the school, now part of the University of London, was renamed the London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women, and in 1998 it became part of the University College London Medical School.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell will always be remembered as proving healing and promoting hope as a healer and an advocate for women’s health.
Resources:
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/elizabeth_blackwell
https://editions.covecollective.org/place/london-school-medicine-women
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/womens-medical-college-of-new-york-infirmary/
http://www.marykatemcmaster.org/WOC/admin/items/show/19294
https://worldhistoryproject.org/1868/elizabeth-blackwell-establishes-a-womens-medical-college
