Elizabeth Blackwell 1821 – 1910
Doctor.
23 February 1821 – 31 May 1910
Elizabeth Blackwell A Tribute by Mary Wright
On 23 January 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell graduated in medicine from Geneva College, New York State. As the first woman qualify as a doctor in America, and have her name entered on the British General Medical Council’s register, she not only made medical history but played a part in opening the medical profession to women in the US and later in the UK. She did this without patronage and confronting a strong wall of prejudice. She is often described as the ‘American lady doctor’ as she qualified and did much of her pioneering work in the United States. However, she was an Englishwoman by birth and spent more than half her life in this country.
Blackwell was born in Bristol on 3 February 1821, to Hannah (neé Lane) and Samuel Blackwell, the third child in a family of nine. Her father was a sugar refiner. Although his business was involved in slavery, he continually experimented with alternative methods of refining sugar beets to eliminate the need for slave labour. This family of religious Dissenters lived frugally. The children were taught mainly at home and were encouraged to read widely and to discuss social and political issues. The Blackwells left England for America when Elizabeth was eleven and the family became involved in anti-slavery activity. However, when Samuel Blackwell died in debt, leaving a widow and nine children unprovided for, the family converted their house into a school where the daughters taught until their brothers were old enough to work.
Blackwell hated teaching but wanted to be economically independent. Medicine, as a potential career, was suggested by a family friend who was dying of uterine cancer. She said she believed she would have suffered less had she been treated by a female doctor and urged Blackwell to consider medicine. Blackwell sought the opinion of those she respected but met with the response that, although there was a need, the obstacles facing a woman entering medicine were unsurmountable. She was not to be deterred and found teaching posts in the households of two doctors who agreed to guide her studies. For two years she taught in schools by day and gave music lessons in the evenings. In her free time, she studied anatomy, physiology and Greek.
As a radical woman in a world of patriarchal medicine, she visited medical professors to argue her case. Most were dismissive. Some advised her to disguise herself as a man. She refused arguing that she must qualify openly and equally with men and have her qualification recognised. To mock her desire to entry, Geneva’s faculty asked its 150 students to decide whether Elizabeth Blackwell should be accepted. To the faculty’s surprise, the students said yes. Blackwell’s entry resulted in facing hostility from her peers and also from the town where she was considered a woman of low morals. Her professors were reluctant to admit her to classes teaching reproduction which was an impediment to her desired work in obstetrics. Blackwell, however, graduated with top honours in every subject.
Her success was widely reported in America and Europe. In England Punch Magazine published verses in praise of ‘Doctrix Blackwell’ and a New York newspaper: the Geneva Gazette, 24th January,1849, declared ‘Elizabeth Blackwell, the world can not thank you too much.’ she was invited into hospitals in London and Birmingham where she attended lectures and examined patients. Blackwell’s welcome reception seems surprising especially as those women who tried to enter medicine after her were also to encounter resistance. It may be that what she had done was seen as the achievement of one exceptional woman rather than the blazing of a trail for other aspiring women.
Before progressing to a career in surgery, Blackwell needed further training. Consequently in 1849, Blackwell enrolled at the Parisian school for midwives La Maternité. Despite being a qualified doctor, she was working with amateur nurses who were semi-literate and illiterate French peasants. Patients were mainly prostitutes with venereal disease. Paris may have been a step towards a surgical career but exposure to physical danger was immense. While she was tending a baby, infectious pus from the child’s eye spurted into hers. Blackwell lost the sight in one eye and also the chance of a potential career as a surgeon.
However, she was not always a solitary warrior. At St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, where she trained as a postgraduate for a year, she worked in every department except that specialising in female diseases. During this period she met the prominent campaigners for Women’s Rights, Barbara Bodichon, her sister Annie Lee Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes; leaders of the Women’s Rights campaign. They introduced her to some of the most progressive thinkers of the day but it would be wrong to imagine that all prominent women in England supported female equality. Florence Nightingale opposed. Writing to John Stuart Mill in 1860, Nightingale stated ‘I wish to see as few doctors as possible – male or female – they [women doctors] have only tried to be men, and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.’ Nightingale’s other proviso, that any woman who became a doctor should pledge to lifelong celibacy was equally unacceptable to Blackwell.
Returning to New York to establish a practice, Blackwell again encountered intense social and professional antagonism. Endorsement came from Quaker women who helped her to open a Dispensary in an area of poverty and, by 1857, she opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, staffed entirely by women. Once the Infirmary was established Blackwell secured a charter for a college for women students.One of the first to enrol was Sophia Jex-Blake. With the college established, Blackwell decided that her pioneering work in America was over.
In 1859 Blackwell had come to England in response to requests to help and advise the women trying to enter the medical profession. Her reputation was being appreciated especially after Rayner Parkes published an article about her in her magazine, The English Women’s Journal (1858). Elizabeth Garrett was in the audience to hear Blackwell’s first lecture. This was on the reproductive process and given to an all-women audience at the Marylebone Literary Institute. Bodichon arranged that Elizabeths Blackwell and Garrett meet so that the younger Garret might have Blackwell’s advice. If Blackwell had not achieved her success as a surgeon, she did have a large role in influencing the achievements of those women who were to follow.
Blackwell lectured in many major cities emphasising the contribution that educated and trained women could make to society. On 1st January 1859 she placed her name on the British Medical Register, the first woman to do so. There were some who were determined that she be the last for they promptly changed the rules to exclude anyone who had qualified outside the United Kingdom.
In 1869 Blackwell lived in Bodichon’s house in Blandford Square, London until she moved into her own home, and Burwood Place consulting rooms. She helped Garrett in her Dispensary and, when the London School of Medicine for Women opened, she accepted the Chair in Gynaecology and a place of the School’s Council. She had always opposed separate medical for women, arguing that it would be perceived as inferior. However, seeing the difficulty women were still having in gaining entry to the top medical colleges, she calculated that, if more rigorous standards were set for entry to the curriculum and examinations, that prejudice would be overcome.
We can see how progressive Blackwell was in her founding of the National Health Society in 1871 which adopted the mantra ‘Prevention is Better than Cure’. The Society was as a source of information on preventative medicine and published pamphlets offering advice on diet and hygiene. It lobbied the government for clean water and succeeded in opening school playgrounds during evenings and school holidays. Members of the NHS Committee organised Penny Lectures to educate the public on health and nutrition. The Society also set up the first training programme for health visitors which continued until it was subsumed into the National Health Service in 1948
In the final years, Blackwell channelled her energies into a wide range of activities: education and prison reform; cooperative movements; animal welfare; sex education and the Garden City movement. She lived with an Irish immigrant to the USA, Kitty Barry Blackwell, who she unofficially adopted as her daughter. In her autobiography she writes of wanting to enter medicine to escape an ordinary marriage. She certainly escaped to make an extraordinary life.
Further Reading
Blackwell, Elizabeth, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women. Longman, Green & Co., 1895
Boyd, Julia, The Excellent Dr Blackwell, Sutton Publishing, 2005
Forster, Margaret, Significant Sisters, Alfred A Knopf, 1985
Nimura,Janice, The Doctors Blackwell, W.W.Norton, 2021
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
Born in Bristol but family moved to America when she was 11.
Educated by a governess until move to Long Island when she started attending school.
Some Achievements and Interests
Opposed to slavery – as a child, with siblings, gave up eating sugar. As an adult attended lectures and campaigned. (Her father, an anti-slavery campaigner, was simultaneously a sugar refiner.)
1838 On the death of her father and while living in Cincinnati, set up a school with her two elder sisters to earn an income to support the family.
1847 Accepted to Geneva Medical College in western New York state. Having been rejected elsewhere because she was a woman, she succeeded here when the Faculty allowed the (all-male) student body to vote on accepting a woman, which, as a joke, they agreed to.
1849 First woman to receive a M.D. degree from an American medical school graduating above her fellow male students.
1850 Met Florence Nightingale, initially sharing many views but later drawing apart. Nightingale hoped Blackwell would be superintendent of a nursing school she planned to open but disagreed with Blackwell on her arguments for women becoming doctors. Blackwell, however, was determined that women should be treated the same as men and not limited to the nursing of women and children.
1850 Returned to New York and set up in private practice.
1853 Opened her own dispensary which then grew, moving from a single room to a house and later developing into the New York Infirmary for Women and Children (opened 1857), a hospital run by women for women.
Lectured on women’s health and hygiene, these lectures being collected in the publication of 1852 The Laws of Life with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls.
1859 Met Elizabeth Garrett Anderson who was to be greatly influenced by her.
1 January 1859 First woman to appear on the newly formed British Medical Registry in the UK. However, in 1860 the Medical Registration Act was reworded so that women doctors who had studied abroad could not register.
Lectured on the value of physiological and medical knowledge to women and on the work of medical women in America.
1859 Back in America, developed her infirmary as a hospital servicing women patients and giving training to women medical students. This opened in 1868 with Blackwell as Professor of Hygiene and her sister, Emily, Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women. Garrett Anderson drew heavily on Blackwell’s experience of developing an infirmary and hospital when planning her own.
Invited along with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to join the Committee set up by Sophia Jex Blake to found the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW).
1869 Settled in England.
1871 One of the Founders of the National Health Society which aimed to effect ‘the steady and wide diffusion of sanitary knowledge among all the people’, their slogan being ‘Prevention is better than cure.’
1875 Worked at the London School of Medicine for Women lecturing in midwifery and sat on the School’s Council.
On the consultancy staff of the New Hospital for Women opened by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
Lectured and wrote on social reform with a particular interest in medical ethics and social morality. She opposed vivisection, contraception and inoculation. Regarding contraception she held that abstinence was the only means of regulating fertility. She disagreed over the importance of vivisection to gain scientific knowledge as advocated by other medical professionals including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
1870s Opposed the Contagious Diseases Acts considering they condoned sexual trafficking. Doing this she took an opposing view to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
1897 Explained, ‘It is not conspicuous public action that is required of us, but the thorough realisation of true physiology. We must ourselves recognise the truth, and instruct parents, that it is a physiological untruth to suppose that sexual Congress is indispensable to male health.’ Blackwell, E; Medical Responsibility in Relation to the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1866-69, address to meeting of Medical Women in London, 27 April 1897.
Issues
Father’s Bristol factory burned down causing the family financial difficulty and prompting the family to move to New York City where his new factory later also burned down.
Father contracted malaria and this adversely affected his health, leading to his early death when she was 17. Following their father’s death, the children needed to earn a living.
Was forced to take teaching positions which she didn’t like, to save to pay for her medical training.
Lost the sight of one eye when she contracted purulent ophthalmia from a patient while working in Paris. She had enrolled in a leading school for midwives as no Paris hospital would admit her as a woman doctor. The loss of the eye forced her to give up the idea of becoming a surgeon.
Applied for many jobs as a physician but turned down as a woman.
In later life she found opposition to many of her views particularly regarding interventionist medicine.
Connection to Bloomsbury
London School of Medicine for Women.
Female Networks
Wide networks in America and England including Lady Anne Noel Byron, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Elizabeth Garrett Andreson, Fanny Kemble, Florence Nightingale, George Eliot and Sophia Jex-Blake,
1856 Adopted Katherine Barry (Kitty) as a daughter and servant. Kitty remained her companion through the rest of her life.
Some Writings/Publications
1852 The Laws of Life with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls (lectures collected).
1860 Medicine as a Profession for Women.
1864 Address on the Medical Education of Women.
1880 The Human Element in Sex.
1891 tract: Erroneous Method in Medical Education – included view opposition to vivisection stressing the need for the development of the role of the pathologist.
1895 Opening the Medical Profession to Women, her autobiography.
1902 Essays in Medical Sociology (a collection of essays).
Further Reading: