Elizabeth Blackwell

Let us now praise famous women, and in particular Elizabeth Blackwell, whose life is here told by John Gehl:

The Anglo-American physician Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) was the first woman to be granted an M.D. degree from a medical school in the United States, graduating in 1849 from the Geneva (N.Y.) Medical College (forerunner of Hobart College). She was born in Bristol, England in 1821 and emigrated with her family to New York in 1832. When her father died in 1838, she and her sister helped support the family by operating a boarding school for girls. She began her medical education by reading medical books and receiving private tutoring. After being refused admission to medical schools in New York and Pennsylvania, she was finally accepted in 1847 by the Geneva Medical College in New York, graduating at the head of her class in 1849.

After graduate studies at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and on the Continent, she practiced in New York City, where in 1857, in spite of much opposition, she established the New York Infirmary, a hospital staffed entirely by women. Later she established a full course of medical education for women there.

During the Civil War she played an important role in forming the Woman's Central Association of Relief to provide military nurses for the Union Army. In 1869 she returned to England, where she became a founder of the London School of Medicine for Women.

In 1875 she left private practice to join the school's faculty as professor of gynecology. A year later, ill health forced her to retire and restrict her professional activities to writing books about sex education and moral reform, two causes she for which she had been an outspoken advocate.

In 1879, she moved permanently to the village of Hastings on the English Channel, where she finally gave up private practice and wrote her autobiography, published in 1895 under the title Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women. She made one more trip back to New York in 1906 but was too ill to visit the New York Infirmary. She died in England in 1910 at the age of 89. The hospital she founded still operates as the New York Infirmary-Strang Clinic on East 15th Street in Manhattan.