The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
A glance at the biography of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, and her Cincinnati connection isn’t obvious, but it is there.
You can find an Ohio historical marker for Blackwell on the corner of the YWCA Building at 898 Walnut St., Downtown.
The English-born woman who practiced medicine in New York and London spent several formative years in Cincinnati, interacting with the local intelligentsia on politics, religion and social reform as well as the matter of women in education. And it was here that she was inspired to become the first woman in America to attend medical school.
Blackwell was born Feb. 3, 1821, in Bristol, England, where her father, Samuel Blackwell, was a sugar refiner. Appalled by the use of slave labor to produce sugar in the British West Indies, he became an outspoken abolitionist.
The family emigrated to America in 1832, when Elizabeth was 11. Living in New York, the family was involved in the anti-slavery struggle, hosted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison at their home and gave refuge to the Rev. Samuel H. Cox from a lynch mob.
In 1838, the Blackwell family moved to Cincinnati with a plan for producing sugar from Midwestern beets. A few months after their arrival, her father died from bilious fever (likely malaria), leaving his widow and nine children with no provisions.
To make ends meet, Elizabeth and her sisters started the Cincinnati English and French Academy for Young Ladies, a day and boarding school, out of their home on Third Street between Lawrence and Pike streets (near present-day Lytle Park), which kept the family solvent for a few years.
“During this long struggle our minds rapidly opened to new views of social and religious duty in the untrammeled social atmosphere of the West,” Blackwell wrote in her 1895 memoir, “Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women.”
She attended political conventions and supported local candidate William Henry Harrison in the 1840 election. When she joined the Unitarian church, shocked families withdrew their children from the academy and the school failed.
Blackwell took a teaching position at a school in Henderson, Kentucky, but having “gained my first practical experience of negro slavery and the crude civilization of a Western slave State,” she returned to Cincinnati after one term.
By then, her family had relocated to Walnut Hills, near Lane Theological Seminary and the prominent Beecher family. Abolition and women’s education remained hot topics.
Then, a lady friend who was dying of a painful disease, said to Blackwell: “You are fond of study, have health and leisure; why not study medicine? If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.”
Blackwell’s first reaction to studying medicine – “the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust” – didn’t last.
She wrote in her diary: “I felt more determined than ever to become a physician, and thus place a strong barrier between me and all ordinary marriage. I must have something to engross my thoughts, some object in life which will fill this vacuum and prevent this sad wearing away of the heart.”
Most people thought her task would be impossible. Medical education was expensive and no school would allow her to take classes. Her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe thought the idea was “impracticable” and warned of the strong prejudice that must be crushed or would crush her.
Resolved to raise money for her medical studies, Blackwell accepted a teaching position in Asheville, North Carolina, with a former physician who let her study from his medical library. She did not return to Cincinnati.
Well-meaning doctors suggested she try studying medicine in Paris and disguise herself as a man, which she rejected. The best medical schools in Philadelphia and New York turned her away, but in 1847 she was accepted by Geneva Medical College (now Hobart College) in western New York.
The faculty had given the matter up to a vote of the students, who unanimously agreed to accept her. She found out later many students thought her application was a joke; but when “the
student actually appeared they gave her a manly welcome, and fulfilled to the letter the promise contained in their invitation,” she wrote.
Through two years of study, challenging unfair restrictions and being shunned by the women in town, she proved herself to doubters and graduated at the top of her class on Jan. 23, 1849.
Margaret Munro DeLancey wrote an eyewitness account of the historic moment: “Last of all came ‘Domina Blackwell’! She ascended the steps. The President touched his cap and rose. You might have heard a pin drop. He
while he conferred the Degree on her, handed her the diploma and bowed, evidently expecting she would bow also and retreat. Not so, however! She seemed embarrassed and after an effort, said to the Dr. – ‘I thank you Sir. It shall be the effort of my life, by God’s blessing, to shed honor on this Diploma’ – then bowed, blushed scarlet, left the stage and took her seat in the front pew among the Graduates, amid the Enthusiastic applause of all present.”
Wanting to be an obstetrician, Blackwell headed to study in Europe, but found as much opposition overseas and took residency at La Maternité as a student midwife in order to gain practical instruction.
On Nov. 4, 1849, some ophthalmia pus from an infant’s eye squirted into her own eye. It became infected, resulting in the loss of vision in the eye. She then had to abandon ambitions to be “the first lady surgeon in the world.”
She returned to New York in 1851 and founded a dispensary clinic. With her sister, Emily – the third woman in the U.S. to receive a medical degree – the dispensary was expanded as the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children with women physicians. It continues today as the New York-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital.
The Blackwell sisters also founded the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary in 1868.
She died in Sussex on May 31, 1910, a pioneer on two continents.