Professor of Anatomy James Webster was her only champion among the faculty. He supported her forthrightly, personally, and actively.
Geneva was a rowdy place in Although he had welcomed Blackwell from the start, he politely suggested that she not attend that particular session. But when she offered him sound reasons why she should attend, he relented, and confessed to the whole class that he had been justly rebuked.
As Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, it was Dr. Charles Alfred Lee who delivered the valedictory address at her commencement. The Grand Debate. Lee went on the defensive. Referring to himself in third person, Lee replied to D.
While he holds this opinion, he at the same time feels bound to say, that the inconveniences attending the admission of females to all the lectures in a medical school, are so great, that he will feel compelled on all future occasions, to oppose such a practice, although by so doing, he may be subjected to the charge of inconsistency. From all we have been able to learn respecting Miss B. Exceptio probat Regulam. Why did these two authors, presumably each secure in the courage of conviction, feel the need to hide behind the veil of noms de plume?
Opening Medicine to Women. In November of that year, while syringing the eyes of a child with purulent ophthalmia, she accidentally splashed her own eye and contracted the disease herself. The resultant blindness of her left eye effectively precluded a career in surgery. Throughout her life, her self-control, perseverence, and optimism were remarkable.
Progressive women of that era managed to survive and prosper professionally and personally in many different ways, e.
Carey Thomas by her iron will, Susan B. Anthony by her unusual political alliances, Emily Blackwell by her keen administrative ability, Matilda Joslyn Gage by her absolute, almost fanatical devotion to liberty; but Elizabeth Blackwell seemed to do it by sheer optimism, her unshakable belief that everything would turn out all right in the end.
Her example inspired countless women, and she in turn was inspired by them. She left Paris to pursue postgraduate medical studies briefly at St.
She became increasingly interested in social causes, especially those regarding the political and educational status of women. Yet a serious Blackwell showed up to pursue her studies, with her admittance creating community uproar due to the prejudices of the time over women receiving a formal education in medicine.
She was ostracized by educators and patients alike at times, though it was also reported that uncouth male students became particularly studious and mature in her presence. Blackwell held firm despite myriad challenges, earning the respect of many of her peers and eventually writing her doctoral thesis on typhus fever. Ranked first in her class, Blackwell graduated in , becoming the first woman to become a doctor of medicine in the contemporary era.
Blackwell returned to Europe and worked in London and Paris. Blackwell later returned to New York City and established a private practice, at first struggling financially again due to the prejudices of the day. With help from her sister and fellow doctor Emily Blackwell, who worked as a surgeon, and physician Marie Zakrzewska, Blackwell also established the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in , an institution that would last for more than a century.
At the end of the decade, while lecturing in England, she became the first woman listed on the British Medical Register. Having maintained that clean sanitary conditions were an important aspect of health, especially in war, Blackwell helped establish the U. Sanitary Commission in under the auspices of President Abraham Lincoln. In the late s, Blackwell opened a medical school for women. Unfortunately only few months later, on Nov. This injury prevented her from becoming a surgeon.
She subsequently studied at St. Ironically, she was permitted to practice all the branches of medicine save gynecology and pediatrics — the two fields in which she was to garner her greatest fame.
When she returned to the United States in , she began practice in New York City but found it tough going, and the patients in her waiting room were few and far between.
One of her colleagues there was her younger sister Emily, who was the third woman in the U. She was also an avid writer whose by-line attracted many readers on a wide range of subjects, including advice to young girls and new parents, household health, medical education, medical sociology and sexual physiology.
Blackwell returned to London a number of times during the s and s and helped establish a medical school for women, the London School of Medicine for Women, in She remained a professor of gynecology there until , when she suffered serious injuries after falling down a flight of stairs. Blackwell died only a few years later, in , after suffering a paralytic stroke at her home in Hastings, East Sussex, England. Her ashes were buried at St. Most often remembered as the first American woman to receive an M.
Blackwell worked tirelessly to secure equality for all members of the medical profession. She chose medicine, not because she loved science or cared about healing in fact, she thought sickness was a sign of weakness and found bodily functions disgusting but because it was an unusually clear way to prove her point.
Her acceptance was something of a farce: the faculty punted the appalling idea of admitting a woman to the students, who found it hilarious and — assuming it was a practical joke — voted unanimously to welcome her. She graduated at the top of the class in , having won the unequivocal respect of her classmates by virtue of her brilliance and discipline.
Outside the college, people tended to think one of two things: either she was wicked, or she was insane. What kind of woman would choose to study the body in the company of men? Acutely aware of the loneliness of her professional path, Blackwell recruited her sister Emily, five years younger, to follow her into medicine.
Medical school included little if any exposure to actual patients, and graduates emerged with a frightening level of ignorance. Blackwell left for Europe in April , three months after graduating, to pursue practical training in Paris, where she studied at a public maternity hospital and was left blind in one eye after contracting an infection from a patient.
A female physician, in the parlance of the time, was an abortionist, someone operating in the shadows and on the wrong side of the law.
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