October 29
On October 29, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell received her medical degree from Geneva Medical College in western New York — the first woman to receive an MD degree from an accredited American medical school. The faculty had agreed to let her attend after putting the admission question to a vote of the male student body; the students voted to admit her as a joke. She graduated first in her class.
Blackwell was born in 1821 in Bristol, England, and emigrated with her family to the United States. After being refused admission to several medical schools on grounds of sex, she was admitted to Geneva and completed the degree. She then went to Paris for further clinical training — where she was admitted to the maternity hospital only as a student midwife, not as a physician — and to London, where she worked briefly at St. Bartholomew's Hospital.
She returned to New York and was refused privileges at every New York hospital. She established a small dispensary in the slums of the city in 1853, which grew into the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in 1857. She ran the Infirmary with her sister Emily, who had also obtained a medical degree after Blackwell's precedent. They trained women physicians during the Civil War.
She returned permanently to England in 1869, where she helped found the London School of Medicine for Women and taught gynecology at the school.
She lived until 1910. Her autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, was published in 1895.
Blackwell was admitted to Geneva Medical College as a joke by students who assumed she would fail or give up. She graduated first in her class. The subsequent refusal of every New York hospital to grant her practice privileges required her to build her own institution — which became a training hospital for women physicians that outlasted the institutions that had refused her. The structure of refusal followed by self-built alternative is the pattern her career required.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.