On July 11, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell received her medical degree from Geneva Medical College in New York — becoming the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. The faculty had let the students vote on her admission as a joke; the students, thinking it was a prank from a rival institution, voted yes.

Blackwell was British-born, had applied to every medical school in the northeast and been rejected by all of them. Geneva was her fifteenth attempt. She graduated first in her class.

The medical establishment's response was largely to ignore that the degree existed. American hospitals refused to admit her as a physician. The medical journals refused her contributions. She moved to Paris and trained in obstetrics, losing the sight in one eye from an infection contracted from a patient, then went to London and was admitted to St Bartholomew's Hospital.

She returned to the United States in 1851 and established a practice in New York, eventually founding the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in 1857 — the first hospital in the United States staffed entirely by women. She also established a women's medical school affiliated with the hospital in 1868.

She spent the rest of her career in England, returning to London in 1869. She was 89 when she died in 1910.