Elizabeth Blackwell: The First Woman Doctor

Dr. Lee, the dean of Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York, stood nervously before the anatomy class. “Gentlemen, I have a letter here that contains a very strange request.” The letter was from his friend, Dr. Warrington of Philadelphia. “Dr. Warrington asks that the college admit a woman who wishes to become…,” he hesitated, “a doctor.”

Female doctors were unheard of in 1847. People at that time thought women were not fit to deal with blood, bones, and diseases. But rather than refuse his friend’s request, Dr. Lee asked the students to decide. “If any single student objects,” he said, “then the woman will not be admitted.”

The students gathered that evening and began trading wisecracks. “Women doctors! How about men mothers?”

Many of the young men thought that it would be fun to have a woman classmate. Others thought that admitting a woman would be a good joke to play on the faculty. When the time came to decide, the students shouted down the lone opposing vote and made the unanimous decision to admit a female student.

Elizabeth Blackwell arrived at Geneva two weeks later. The small, fair-haired woman was serious about becoming a doctor. She also hoped that she could promote women’s rights in general.

Elizabeth had been born in England in 1821, and when she was eleven years old, moved with her family to America. She grew up in a home alive with new but unpopular ideas. Elizabeth listened intently as her father and his dinner guests discussed ways to fight slavery and child labor and methods to achieve equal rights for all people.

Her father gave his five daughters the same education in languages, history, and mathematics that he gave his four sons. “Sheer nonsense,” said Elizabeth’s unmarried aunt Barbara, who lived with them. Aunt Barbara saw no reason to educate young ladies. But Elizabeth spent her pocket money on books and found “the present of a new book the greatest delight.”

When her father died, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth and two older sisters opened a school in their home. Their teaching helped support the family, but Elizabeth was not content. She wanted to do something more challenging, something that would stretch her mind and use up some of her restless energy.

She ruled out marriage — she would never find a man who would give her as much freedom as her father had. Yet she did not want to end up like Aunt Barbara, forced to depend on a brother for support. She racked her brains to think of something that an independent, educated woman could do.

One day when she was visiting a dying friend, the woman said to her, “Why don’t you study medicine? My illness would have caused me much less pain and embarrassment if I had been treated by a lady doctor.”

Elizabeth balked at the idea. “I hated everything connected with the body,” she wrote later. “I could not bear the sight of a medical book.” Yet she found herself lying awake at night thinking about it. Becoming a doctor would give her the challenge she needed so badly. It would, she wrote, “fill my emptiness and prevent this sad wearing away of my heart.”

So she decided to become a doctor. She took teaching jobs to earn money. She studied medical books and lost her fear of them. Finally, she went to Philadelphia, the home of the best medical schools in the country.

The doctors Elizabeth visited in Philadelphia all told her that she could not be a doctor. Dr. Joseph Warrington urged her to become a nurse. Or, he said, she could go to Paris, dress as a man, and try to get into one of the medical schools there.

Such outlandish advice only made Elizabeth more determined. “The idea has taken deep root in my soul, and I cannot lay it aside,” she wrote to a friend.

She applied to smaller schools. One application went to Geneva Medical College, along with the letter from Dr. Warrington that led to her acceptance.

Elizabeth’s first days at Geneva were difficult. Townspeople stared at her, rooming houses turned her away, and other students ignored her. But she was determined and finally sensed that her classmates were warming up to her when they began calling her “Blackwell.”

During the summer between her two years at Geneva, Elizabeth returned to Philadelphia to work in the Blockley Almshouse, a hospital for the poor. The food there was bad, and the nurses, undereducated and underpaid, seemed uncaring. Odors hung in the air, but the windows were kept closed.

When Elizabeth’s mother heard of Blockley’s conditions, she was horrified. “Do not fear for me,” Elizabeth wrote to her. “I live simply, do my duty, and trust in God.” The situation at Blockley made Elizabeth dream of having a hospital where kind, well-trained nurses would guide women back to health in pleasant surroundings.

Elizabeth graduated at the top of her class in 1849, the first woman ever to earn a medical degree.

She went to Paris to gain experience, but no hospital there would accept a woman as an intern. Elizabeth had to settle for being a nursing apprentice in La Maternité, a large women’s hospital. She was determined to make the most of the experience. To her sister Anna she wrote, “I shall give baths and make beds and empty slops, and I’ll like it all, for I shall be learning.”

The plight of the poor women particularly touched Elizabeth. She watched in angry silence as a male doctor operated on a woman with no concern for her pain and embarrassment and even less concern for cleanliness. Elizabeth knew she could do better. She decided to become a surgeon.

Soon after, a terrible thing happened. She was treating a baby for ophthalmia, a serious eye disease, when some of the fluid spurted into her left eye. Elizabeth caught the dreaded disease, and after a few weeks her doctors concluded that the sight in that eye was hopelessly lost. Anna, who was in Paris, helped her sister through “two days of unspeakable grief and despair.” The eye was eventually removed. Elizabeth did not want to perform operations with less than perfect vision, and so she abandoned her hopes of becoming a surgeon. But she was still a doctor. Elizabeth soon recovered her strength and drive. She returned to America and opened an office in New York City.

Not many patients came to see her. Elizabeth knew that most of the poor families in the city needed medical care, but could not afford it. So she raised money, rented a house, and started a free clinic.

Slowly people began to come. Elizabeth also went to see them in their unhealthy living conditions. She recalled that in one sick child’s home, “the thermometer varied from 86 to 90 in the house, and it stood at 102 in some rooms downtown. The heat made my brain seem too large for my head.”

Elizabeth realized that people could prevent most diseases if they knew how. She encouraged cleanliness and proper food storage, exercise, fresh air, and plenty of sunshine.

Although absorbed in her work, Elizabeth began to feel that she was missing something by living alone. She paid several visits to an orphanage and eventually adopted seven-year-old Kitty Barry. Kitty, who was thin and under-nourished, blossomed under Elizabeth’s care into a lively, intelligent child. She became fiercely devoted to Elizabeth, whom she called “Doctor” or “My Doctor.” “Who will ever guess the support which that poor little orphan has been to me?” wrote Elizabeth two years later. When Kitty grew up, she stayed with Elizabeth as her traveling companion and secretary.

In 1857 Elizabeth opened the New York Infirmary, a hospital for women and children that is still in existence today. The hospital became a training center for the first nursing school in America. In 1868 she opened a medical college for women, the first school in the United States to teach hygiene, or disease prevention.

When other medical schools for women opened their doors, Elizabeth considered her work in America completed. She and Kitty returned to England where Elizabeth promoted hygiene and worked for women’s causes until a few years before her death at the age of eighty-nine.