The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura
My dad brought this book to my attention—fitting, since we are related to the Blackwells on his side of the family. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821—1910) was the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. Her younger sister Emily (1826—1910) became the third woman to do so.
Even if I wasn’t related to this remarkable family, I would want to learn what drove these two young women to break from society’s expectation and achieve something unheard of.
The Blackwell family in England had established a pattern of going against the current tide. Samuel Blackwell, father of Elizabeth and Emily and their seven siblings, was a sugar refiner and early anti-slavery activist who experimented with ways to use beets instead of sugar to reduce the need for manual labor. Family matriarch Hannah, the daughter of a convicted criminal, devoted herself to ensuring her own family’s morality and stability. The entire family, disillusioned by the Church of England, became protestant Dissenters and emigrated to America. They supported women’s suffrage before the issue came to a forefront, and two Blackwell brothers married two of the most influential women of their time.
Elizabeth’s many applications to medical school were laughed at and tossed aside, simply because she was a woman. However, the faculty at Geneva Medical School in western New York State decided to put Elizabeth’s application to a vote among the current class. The medical students there voted to admit Elizabeth—but as a joke, just to see their faculty finagle their way out of a predicament. Elizabeth’s offer of admission was honored, but once on campus, she was told that since she was a female, she would be too sensitive to attend certain anatomy courses. Then, when she showed up at class anyway, she was scoffed at for paying close attention. Between school terms, she made the best of the only option offered to her and worked in a mental hospital.
When Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from Geneva Medical College on January 23, 1849, the standing ovation of spectators included a wave of women from the community—wives, mothers, teachers, nurses—who had come to see a woman make history.
Five years later, Elizabeth’s sister Emily became the third woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
As practicing physicians, Elizabeth and Emily became close friends with Florence Nightingale. Although all three women agreed that women’s potential was going unfulfilled, their philosophies differed. Nightingale saw the answer in improved public health—a world where female nurses nurtured the sick in ever-improving ways. The Blackwells, however, dreamed of elevating women in any way they could—and the medical field was the biggest, best target for change.
On May 12, 1857, on the corner of Bleecker and Crosby Streets in New York City, Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell established the first hospital in America that would be for, staffed, and run by women. On that historic day, Elizabeth Blackwell proclaimed the institution to be “a hospital and dispensary for poor women and children.”
One of the most fascinating aspects of this story, for me, came from learning what drove Elizabeth to so resolutely pursue an achievement that no one else had accomplished.
Author Janice P. Nimura explains it this way:
From the beginning, Elizabeth had seen medicine as a tool for showing people how to live: first in terms of opening the profession to women, and later as a way of teaching hygiene, both physical and moral. The girl who had refused to admit when she was sick grew into a woman who refused to accept human imperfection.
Though this book is a little longer and more detailed than many I keep here in my library, page after page, The Doctors Blackwell delivers a well-written and engaging biography. I highly recommend it.
Reader, is there an impossible dream on your horizon? I’m inspired to think you could make it happen.
Here with you,
Laura
