March 24, 2014 • 31 mins
It's not a story of a person with a childhood dream of pursuing a career that wasn't available to them. Dr. Blackwell had no interest in medicine as a child. But she paved the way for women who came after her and changed the face of medicine in the U.S. Read the show notes for this episode here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly pro. Holly, did you
know that, according to the American Medical Association, of positions
(00:22):
in America today are women. I did not know that.
That seems like a smaller number than I thought. Yeah, Like,
I was surprised by the smallness of that number. I
am too. I mean, when I think about most of
the gps that, like I've seen in the last I
don't know decade, even in the listings, I remember searching
(00:42):
for them at various points, it seemed like there was
either a more even or even tipped more towards women.
But maybe that's just been a coincidence of my providers. Yeah. Well,
and I remember earlier this year when my uh, when
my general my GP was on maternity leave, the person
anser ring the phone at the practice said, well, our
other female doctor is And I was like, what do
(01:03):
you mean our other female doctor? There were like nine
doctors in this practice. I've always been fortunate enough that
if I want a woman doctor, I can find one. Yeah, Like,
there are definitely places where people who want to see
a woman doctor can only find male doctors. Uh. But
before the eighteen fifties, there were basically zero women doctors
(01:25):
in the United States, and Dr Elizabeth Blackwell was the
first woman to graduate from an American medical school and
also the first woman listed in Great Britain's medical register.
She really paved the way for the women who came
after her. So she didn't just become a doctor herself.
She tirelessly worked towards greater access for medical education and
(01:46):
work in medicine for women. And she was also a
social reformer. And she's we're going to talk about today,
And this is not one of those stories where someone
had a childhood dream of pursuing a career that was
for some reason closed to them. She had no interest
in medicine whatsoever as a child, and this was a
career that, you know, came to her later in her
(02:08):
life when she was a young adult. She actually started
out in a career path that was much more available
to women at the time, which was that she was
a teacher, and she used her work as a teacher
to kind of get her foot in the door for
being a doctor. It is funny to think about because
even today most people that want to be doctors know
(02:29):
it at a really early age, and their kind of
education is focused from a very young age. Often, not always,
but most of the time frequently. Yeah, so it's kind
of interesting to think, like, at some point in her
teaching career ship doctor. Yeah, we will get to that,
but first we'll do the basics on her beginnings. So
(02:49):
she was born in Bristol, England, and her parents were
Hannah Lane and Samuel Blackwell, and they had met when
they were Sunday school teachers together. Her family was a
rather a large one. She grew up with four sisters
and four brothers, and she also had two other brothers
who died when they were babies. Uh. This was a
deeply religious Congregationalist family as well as being socially very liberal,
(03:14):
and they were also abolitionist, which was a problematic sentiment
for the family. Elizabeth's father was a prosperous sugar refiner
and the sugar he refined had been farmed, of course,
using slave labor. Yeah, they were in a very that's
a conflicted party situation. They were in a knowingly yucky
situation where they were they were vehemently against this practice
(03:35):
and yet that practice is what was supporting their families,
so they did actually a lot of work with Quakers
trying to find alternate UH sources of sugar to refine
that was not farmed with slave labor. UH they moved
away from working in that industry. Also, UM their religion,
though meant that the children couldn't attend Church of England schools,
(03:58):
so they mostly learned at home under the care of
governesses and tutors, and all of the children were really
eager students. They spent most of their pocket money buying books. Um.
They were also they weren't just stay indoors bookish people,
although they were that. They were also very fond of
walking and playing outdoors. And the family moved to the
United States in eighteen thirty two when Elizabeth was eleven.
(04:20):
Her father's sugar refinery had burned down and he had
wanted to take a more active part in the fight
against slavery, and the children had all given up sugar
because of the use of slavery and its farming and production.
So yes, ultimately they stopped playing a part in the
practice that they all abhorred. So once they arrived in
(04:41):
the United States, the family started out in New York
and Jersey City, and this is when Elizabeth and her
school aged siblings started going to regular schools for the
first time. The whole family became really involved in the
fight for abolition also, and William Lloyd Garrison, who was
the man behind the anti slavery new paper The Liberator,
became a family friend and a frequent guest in their home,
(05:04):
and when Elizabeth was seventeen, the family moved to Ohio.
A few months after they arrived in Cincinnati, though her
father died, they had already become far less affluent than
they had been in England, and of course before their
refinery burned down, but this left the family without any
kind of financial support. Elizabeth and her two older sisters
(05:25):
started a school for girls, and their oldest brother got
a job in the mayor's office. Together, the four of
them supported the family until the youngest children were also
old enough to work, and the sisters also became politically
active in causes other than abolition, campaigning for greater access
to education for women and girls, UH primarily, and they
(05:47):
also joined the Episcopal Church, and they developed relationships with
Transcendentalists who had moved to Cincinnati from New England. They
kept their school running until eighteen forty two, when enough
of the younger brothers had gone into business that they
didn't need quite so much money, and Elizabeth continued to
teach privately. That year, she was invited to run a
school for girls that was being started in Kentucky, and
(06:10):
she accepted the position and she moved, and that was
a very difficult time for her. She had been kind
of sheltered in her life up to this point, and
Kentucky was a slave state, and living there was really
her first exposure to real world slavery, this thing that
they had in their family been talking about being against
for years and years. And the town that she lived
(06:31):
in was also much poorer and less developed than anywhere
else she had lived, and Elizabeth was expected to begin
teaching pretty much the moment she arrived, so a very
stressful transition. Yeah. She wound up teaching there for three
years before going back to Ohio, joining her family in
a town called Walnut Hills, which was at that point
outside of Cincinnati. It became part of Cincinnati itself a
(06:54):
few years later, in eighteen sixty nine, and when she
returned to Cincinnati, Elizabeth about twenty four and the idea
of being a doctor had still not even entered her
mind at this point. And while she really liked to study,
she was primarily focused on history, metaphysics, German, and music.
But she wanted to do something more and something difficult,
(07:15):
though she was not sure what that thing was. This
is a trade. I kind of love about her. I
think she's kind of like me, and that she always
wanted to tilt at the windmill. She was looking for
another windmill. And the idea to study medicine actually came
from a friend of hers who was dying, and in
her writing, Elizabeth doesn't specifically say what her friend was
(07:36):
dying of. We can kind of into it that it
had something to do with her reproductive system, but in
Elizabeth's words, it's quote delicate nature made the methods of
treatment a constant suffering to her. So Elizabeth's friend thought
that if she had been able to have a woman
doctor instead of a man doctor, that she would have
(07:57):
been spared the most uncomfortable and upsetting part of her treatment.
So Elizabeth's friend thought that a great next thing for
Elizabeth to do to do would be to become a
doctor herself. And Elizabeth's response to her friend's suggestion was
along the lines of what, No, I hate bodies and
everything about them, and I also hate medical textbooks. Uh.
(08:17):
And in her own life, she also hated being sick,
and she found any kind of illness to be sort
of shameful. I identify with all of these things. I
could never do anything medical and illness angers and frustrates me,
and I feel weird shame over it. I don't understand this,
but I acknowledge and recognize it. Yeah. Well, And at
(08:40):
the same time, Elizabeth could not get this thought of
being a doctor out of her mind. She she had
been so much like, Nope, that not for me, but
the idea just kept kind of picking at her. Finally,
a couple of things tipped the scale in favor of
actually going to medical school, and the first was that
she described herself as falling in love a little too easily,
(09:01):
but she didn't like the idea of what marriage would
mean to her life. She concluded that if she became
a doctor, she would never have to get married because
a doctor's life and a traditional wife's life were so
incompatible with each other. Yeah, that is sort of a
wonderful logic. She kind of softened on her view about marriage.
Although she never got married. She kind of kind of
(09:21):
ease back on this idea that like being a wife
was terrible later in her life, but at this point
she was like, you know what, if I were a
doctor too busy for that, I wouldn't have to get married. Uh.
It also became, in her words, a moral struggle. She
really thought the world would be a lot better if
women were allowed to play a more active part in
(09:42):
all aspects of it, one of those things being practicing medicine. Um.
She also wanted to reclaim the word female physician, which
was at this point in history really a euphemism for abortionist,
and Elissenath started asking doctors that her family knew about
how to become a doctor her self. Uh. The idea
of a woman doctor, though, was so unheard of that
(10:04):
she didn't really know where to start, and everyone she
spoke with seemed to think that it was both a
good idea and also basically impossible. Medical schools were for
men only and they were extremely expensive, So Elizabeth started
trying to raise money to study medicine in Paris, which, Uh,
Paris comes up over and over again in this story
(10:24):
is sort of this place that was so off the
rails in terms of morality that maybe they would not
have a problem with a woman's studying medicine. Um, she
thought it might be more acceptable for her to pursue
an education there, but the cost was just enormous, so
she accepted a teaching job in North Carolina, hoping to
save money to pay her way into a school in
(10:48):
the United States. The school's principle had also been a doctor,
and he was going to tutor her in addition to
her doing her teaching duties. All of this was going
to happen in Asheville, which is my favorite place. Yeah. Uh,
did you know that when you selected her? Was it
one of those magical accidents? I did not. Yeah, And
it was one of those things where I was reading
her autobiography and I suddenly was like, I know where
(11:10):
she's talking about. I got very excited. Uh. And the
school that she went to in Aasheville actually disbanded in
eighteen forty six, and at that point she moved to Charleston,
South Carolina, and there she studied with another doctor named
Samuel H. Dickinson, and she also taught music at a
school that was run by someone that Dickinson knew. She
kind of had a lot of favory connections going on
(11:32):
and makings meet and study. Yeah, there was definitely a
combination of her working as a teacher while someone nearby
helped her learn about medicine. Before we get into her
official start of actual medical school, would you like to
take a moment away from our story of this woman
who loved to learn to talk about our new sponsor,
(11:52):
and now let's get back to America's first female m D.
That sounds grand. So by eighteen, Elizabeth finally felt like
she had enough money for medical school, and so she
went to Philadelphia, which was at this point pretty much
the capital of medical instruction in the United States. She
applied to four medical colleges in Philadelphia, and she kept
(12:14):
studying anatomy in a private school, and her journals from
this period described being laughed at, being dismissed, told to
try the New England medical schools, or maybe the ones
in Paris. There was even a Philadelphia medical professor who
told her that while personally he was completely in favor
of women's studying medicine, it was so impossible that the
(12:34):
only way it was ever going to happen was if
she disguised herself as a man. So he was like, no,
I'm cool, but you're going to have to wear a mustache, right,
just so weird in her words. But neither the advice
to go to Paris nor the suggestion of disguise tempted
me for a moment. It was, to my mind a
(12:56):
moral crusade on which I had entered a course of
justice and common sense, and it must be pursued in
the light of day and with public sanction in order
to accomplish its end. That is a woman who has
found her windmill. Uh. And after she exhausted her options
for medical schools in both New York and Philadelphia, she
got a list of smaller medical colleges known as quote
(13:19):
country schools throughout the Northeast, and she chose the twelve
most promising, And she finally got a letter from Geneva University,
which is in western New York, and her application had
been presented to the faculty, which had not really been
in favor of admitting her, but had presented her application
to the students, And so she later received the following documents.
(13:42):
It said, at a meeting of the entire medical class
of Geneva Medical College held this day, October seven. The
following resolutions were unanimously adopted. One resolved that one of
the radical principles of a Republican government is the universal
education of both sexes, That to every branch of scientific education,
(14:04):
the door should be open equally to all, that the
application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our
class meets our entire approbation. And then, extending our unanimous invitation,
we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause
her to regret her attendance at this institution. To resolved
(14:26):
that a copy of these proceedings be signed by the
Chairman and transmitted to Elizabeth Blackwell. Doesn't that sound great?
It really does. It was not actually, uh the there
there were some shenanigans. That was some really good writing.
It was some great writing. So, but the thing is,
the faculty was not super into this idea at all,
(14:49):
and a lot of the students who voted on it
thought that it was a prank being played on them
by a rival college. Oh dear, Yeah, we'll talk about
that more in a second. But you know, long story short,
she got in uh and on November four of eighty seven,
she left Philadelphia to go to Geneva and start medical school,
(15:09):
and overall the other medical students that Geneva welcomed her.
They were courteous and friendly. They would save her a
seat for lectures, and most of the time they treated
her as a friend and a colleague, and she described
the behavior of her male classmates during the two years
that she studied as that of quote true Christian gentleman.
Later on, Elizabeth learned that some of the students had
(15:31):
thought her application was a hoax or a prank being
played on them by rival college as Tracy Sin, But
once they found themselves with an actual female student, they did,
for the most part, live up to what they had
resolved in that letter. Yeah. I think that's where they
kind of rise above the fact that they thought someone
was playing a trick on them. Her teachers mostly traded
her fairly also, although there was some level of consternation
(15:54):
about how to handle anatomy lectures on the reproductive system
when there was a woman in the so occasionally she
was asked to sit out for particular demonstrations, and some
of her anatomical studies were conducted in private. Along with
four of the quote steadier male students, and they pretty
much treated her in these lectures like an older sister.
(16:16):
And the town of Geneva, on the other hand, seemed
to see her as something of an aberration. She was
stared at in the street, and she gradually learned that
people believed she was either immoral or insane. Yeah, they
were pretty much waiting for her to reach some kind
of chipping point and go on a rampage through the
town in some way, like the town did not snap.
(16:37):
She also sometimes did have trouble with the distaste for
the human body that we talked about earlier. She had
always had this. She was not really sure how she
was going to deal with it in medical school, and
she wrote in her journal about some dissections that she
could just barely stand to witness. But this was not
unique to her at all. Some of her male classmates
(16:57):
were just as overcome by them as she was. Not
anything that had anything to do with her sex. No,
And I think even today when you hear stories from
friends that have attended medical school, there is a lot
of like half the people were sick at this lecture
kind of ya. That's not uncommon. Between her first and
second years of school, she went back to Philadelphia, where
(17:18):
she arranged to study in one of the hospital wards
at Blockley Alms House, which was later known as Philadelphia
General Hospital, and in addition to working with Philadelphia's poor,
she also worked with Irish immigrants displaced by the potato famine,
many of whom had typhus, and she actually wound up
writing about typhus for her thesis. They called it ship
fever then, because everybody got it on the ship. Yeah.
(17:42):
This is one of the places where she really started
realizing that a lot of the problems that people were
having in terms of sickness work coming straight from hygiene,
and she became very focused on good hygiene and good
sanitation as being extremely important to people's health. Um. So,
while her classmates at Jenny of A We're pretty much
supportive of the fact that she was there, the doctors
(18:03):
at the alms House really were not. A lot of
the residents would just stop working when she came into
the room. Um and then they stopped writing patients diagnoses
on their charts to basically make it harder for her.
She was she wasn't there as a doctor, She was
there as an observer, and they were basically trying to
make it so she didn't really have a lot to observe.
(18:24):
I'm just wondering how that would figure into, for example,
your hippocratic oath, where you're supposed to be doing everything
you can to take care of a person, and then
you let this petty stuff get in the way. That's
a great question. Elizabeth returned to Geneva after the summer,
and she graduated at the top of her class in
eighteen forty nine, becoming the first woman to earn an
empty from an American medical school. And before we talk
(18:47):
about what happened after medical school, let's take another moment
and talk about our other sponsor today. That sounds fabulous
do So to get back to Dr Blackwell, as she
is now, Dr Blackwell, she wanted to become, in her words,
the first lady surgeon in the world, and she realized
that the education she was going to need to do
this was still really not open to her in the
(19:07):
United States. But fortunately some of her cousins who lived
in England had been visiting the US and they invited
her to go back to Europe with them, and so
she went abroad, studying medicine in London and Paris for
two years, and she also studied midwiffery while they're at
La Maternity, which is a school for training midwives. This
was both very difficult and very rewarding. She had very
(19:31):
little privacy, It's kind of a near monastic experience, and
because of the nature of midwiffery, she did not get
very much sleep. She did, though, get an enormous amount
of hands on experience in a very condensed time frame,
and a lot of this influenced her practice later, and
it also kept hammering home on the fact that hygiene
(19:53):
and sanitation were lacking in the world, which needed to
be fixed and unfortunate. Uh This work and these revelations
are also what derailed her from her plans to become
a surgeon. One day, while she was treating a baby
that had an eye infection caused by gnarrhea, some of
the water that she was using splashed into her own eye,
(20:14):
which became infected as well. She asked for permission to
leave until it got better, and at first she was denied,
but then when Monsieur Blott, the intern, realized what was happening,
he talked to the chief physician who examined her and
told her to stop work immediately and be treated. This
effect on her eyesight was pretty much immediate. She she
couldn't see very well out of it. It was extremely inflamed.
(20:36):
In addition to the fact that she couldn't see very well,
it uh like it was disturbing to other people to
look at. It was just a very uh frightening looking infection.
But Dr Blackwell was hopeful that this was temporary and
that with treatment it would get better. She continued to
have flare ups though, and ultimately the eye had to
be removed and replaced with a glass one, and that
(20:58):
pretty much made a surgical career impossible. She decided to
return to London in eighteen fifty and the cousin wrote
to introduce her to the St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and while
studying there, she met and worked with the famous Florence Nightingale,
the founder of modern nursing. They were pretty much contemporaries.
We could have a whole episode on their relationship with
(21:18):
each other. Uh they did not always see eyed eye
completely on things. Um So Dr Blackwell wanted to practice
in London, but she didn't have a lot of money.
She didn't have a huge network of family and friends
to support her. She ultimately went back to the United States,
hoping that she could save enough money to go back
to England in ten or fifteen years, and she went
(21:40):
to New York and she started along and uphill battle
of trying to build her own practice. And while the
students at Geneva had welcomed her, the medical community was
deeply reluctant to associate with her in any way. The
first people she actually became friends with were Quakers, and
the Quaker community helped her find locations where she could
practice medicine and deliver like rs on women's health. And
(22:01):
she described her practice in those years as a very
Quaker one. There's a sort of a thread of different
religious influences that tracks through her whole life, with this
being sort of the most recent Quaker faith. She did
not have very much medical companionship because the other doctors
were just really suspicious of a woman practicing medicine, and
(22:26):
so she didn't have much opportunity to learn from other
doctors either. Patients also resisted the idea of seeing a woman,
and she was such a lonely existence overall that in
October of eighteen fifty four, she took in a seven
year old orphaned girl who she later adopted, and that
same year doctor Blackwell's sister, Emily graduated from the Medical
(22:48):
College of Cleveland. She went on to study in Europe
as well, and when she returned, the sisters started a
dispensary together. It was clear that the doctor's Blackwell were
pretty much gonna have to make their own opportunit tunities
for their practice and for furthering their own medical education,
So the two of them collaborated with Dr Marie Zakrazuska,
(23:08):
who and they together opened the New York Infirmary for
Women and Children in eighteen fifty seven. They basically rented
a house and then outfitted it for their own purposes.
This wasn't just a medical facility. It was also a
place that other women who were doctors and wanted to
become doctors could find additional work in the training that
Dr Blackwell herself had not had a lot of success
(23:32):
finding in the United States, and this, as you can imagine,
was another uphill struggle. In an annual report listed all
of the objections that the women had encountered. They were
told that no one would let a house for the
purpose that female doctors should be looked upon with so
much suspicion that the police would interfere, that if deaths occurred,
(23:52):
their death certificates would not be recognized, that they would
be resorted to by classes and persons whom it would
be an insult to be called upon to deal with.
As my personal side, I once again have a hippocratic
oath question mark. There uh that without men as resident physicians,
they would not be able to control the patients, That
if any accident occurred, not only the medical profession but
(24:14):
the public would blame the trustees for supporting such an undertaking.
And finally, that they would never be able to collect
money enough for so unpopular an effort giant windmill. They
made it anyway. Their infirmary eventually flourished. They provided medical
care and instruction, and they taught poor women how to
(24:34):
care for their children. And this really went on until
the start of the Civil War. At that point, Dr
Blackwell founded the Women's Central Association of Relief or the
w c a R, which focused on training women to
be nurses for injured soldiers and on collecting medical supplies.
In eighteen sixty seven, so after the war ended, the
infirmary opened its own medical college, and by this time
(24:58):
access to medical education and pray. This was vastly different
for women in the United States, but it still had
a really long way to go. Many medical programs either
admitted women to their programs or were exclusively for women,
although these were generally inferior to men's colleges. Hospitals and
other facilities were also more open to employing women, although
(25:18):
the opportunities were still not really numerous, uh, and there
were still schools that stridently worked against women as students,
including her alma mater, which rejected Dr Blackwell's sister, which
I find fascinating. Yeah, it seems like that like that
worked out great, We're never doing it again. Dr Blackwell
eventually returned to England again in eighteen sixty nine, and
(25:41):
what she was hoping to do was to stay there
a long time and practice medicine. She did wind up
living there for the rest of her life, but her
health started to decline not long after she arrived. She
was forced to take a lot of time off to recuperate,
and by the eighteen seventies she stopped practicing entirely, though
she did continue you to campaign for opportunities for women
(26:02):
in medicine, and she continued to work towards social reform.
She died in nineteen ten, a couple of years after
a pretty bad fall had had really caused her a
lot of physical and mental issues, and at that point
she had paved the way for a whole new career
path for women. She really had. Uh we we haven't
(26:22):
really talked about a lot of the actual medicine that
she was practicing. Some of that is sort of saw
bones territory if you haven't given that podcast a listen yet.
For example, when she like when her own eye infection
was being treated, which is like, this is an infection
that was pretty common at the time. It was it
was something would happen to babies when they were born
(26:43):
to a woman who had gnaria um. Like the treatment
involved leeches on her head. Uh, not very effective at
treating an eye infection caused by ganeria grow. Yeah, there
was a lot of stuff that was kind of gross,
and a lot of the medicine that was being taught
at that point is actually pretty not recognized as medicine today.
(27:07):
But like that that was the state of medicine, and
she helped make it a place where women also could
learn and practice. Um, we didn't. We also didn't talk
a whole lot about all of her other social reform
efforts that went on in conjunction with her medical practice
and afterwards. That could be a whole other episode. There
was a lot of that to you. WHOA, well, why
(27:30):
we think about whether or not that will become an episode?
Do you want to read some listener mail for us?
I would. I have listener mail that's from Victoria and
she says, high ladies, I've just finished listening to your
Jane Austin podcast and you mentioned the history book that
she wrote before Penning Eleanor and Maryanne had to email
you because I think I actually own a copy of
this very book. The inside cover states that she wrote
it in seventeen nine, which would be six years before
(27:52):
Pride and Prejudice, when she was sixteen. It's very short,
only about fifteen pages, but utterly delightful, and I think
you would love it if you have read it already.
I particularly adore the title, which is the history of
England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian, and then
it says there will be very few dates in this history,
(28:15):
which is I feel that way in page history. Yeah, sure,
how deep he could go? Actually feel that way about
our episodes. Sometimes there are very few dates in our
episodes sometimes because it just becomes dates, soup and the
There are other things that we can talk about besides
a whole long list of dates. Um so, yes, Victoria, Uh,
you can find this on the internet. Also if you
(28:38):
want the very brief and very biased history of England,
which is pretty great. Um so, yes, we will put
a link to that in our shore notes. I pretty
quickly was able to dig it up on the internet.
Victoria was like, I've read this. I was like, you know,
probably find that easy. Uh. And then she signs off
as Vicky. So perhaps I should have called Vicky that
at the beginning. Perhaps thank you very much for writing
(29:01):
to us. Vicky. You have sounded like a disappointed mom
to begin with. I am often a disappointed mom when
I when I mess myself up somehow. Uh So, anyway,
thank you Vicky for writing to us. If you would
like to write to us, you can. We're at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at
Facebook dot com slash missed in History and on Twitter
(29:22):
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slash miss in history. If you're wondering why we've used
miss in history so many times for so many different aliases,
it is to match our brand new website. Yes, it's
all sparkly and fresh. It is called www dot miss
in history dot com. You can listen to every single
(29:43):
episode we've ever done on the website. It's much easier
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(30:03):
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(30:24):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly pro. Holly, did you
know that, according to the American Medical Association, of positions
(00:22):
in America today are women. I did not know that.
That seems like a smaller number than I thought. Yeah, Like,
I was surprised by the smallness of that number. I
am too. I mean, when I think about most of
the gps that, like I've seen in the last I
don't know decade, even in the listings, I remember searching
(00:42):
for them at various points, it seemed like there was
either a more even or even tipped more towards women.
But maybe that's just been a coincidence of my providers. Yeah. Well,
and I remember earlier this year when my uh, when
my general my GP was on maternity leave, the person
anser ring the phone at the practice said, well, our
other female doctor is And I was like, what do
(01:03):
you mean our other female doctor? There were like nine
doctors in this practice. I've always been fortunate enough that
if I want a woman doctor, I can find one. Yeah, Like,
there are definitely places where people who want to see
a woman doctor can only find male doctors. Uh. But
before the eighteen fifties, there were basically zero women doctors
(01:25):
in the United States, and Dr Elizabeth Blackwell was the
first woman to graduate from an American medical school and
also the first woman listed in Great Britain's medical register.
She really paved the way for the women who came
after her. So she didn't just become a doctor herself.
She tirelessly worked towards greater access for medical education and
(01:46):
work in medicine for women. And she was also a
social reformer. And she's we're going to talk about today,
And this is not one of those stories where someone
had a childhood dream of pursuing a career that was
for some reason closed to them. She had no interest
in medicine whatsoever as a child, and this was a
career that, you know, came to her later in her
(02:08):
life when she was a young adult. She actually started
out in a career path that was much more available
to women at the time, which was that she was
a teacher, and she used her work as a teacher
to kind of get her foot in the door for
being a doctor. It is funny to think about because
even today most people that want to be doctors know
(02:29):
it at a really early age, and their kind of
education is focused from a very young age. Often, not always,
but most of the time frequently. Yeah, so it's kind
of interesting to think, like, at some point in her
teaching career ship doctor. Yeah, we will get to that,
but first we'll do the basics on her beginnings. So
(02:49):
she was born in Bristol, England, and her parents were
Hannah Lane and Samuel Blackwell, and they had met when
they were Sunday school teachers together. Her family was a
rather a large one. She grew up with four sisters
and four brothers, and she also had two other brothers
who died when they were babies. Uh. This was a
deeply religious Congregationalist family as well as being socially very liberal,
(03:14):
and they were also abolitionist, which was a problematic sentiment
for the family. Elizabeth's father was a prosperous sugar refiner
and the sugar he refined had been farmed, of course,
using slave labor. Yeah, they were in a very that's
a conflicted party situation. They were in a knowingly yucky
situation where they were they were vehemently against this practice
(03:35):
and yet that practice is what was supporting their families,
so they did actually a lot of work with Quakers
trying to find alternate UH sources of sugar to refine
that was not farmed with slave labor. UH they moved
away from working in that industry. Also, UM their religion,
though meant that the children couldn't attend Church of England schools,
(03:58):
so they mostly learned at home under the care of
governesses and tutors, and all of the children were really
eager students. They spent most of their pocket money buying books. Um.
They were also they weren't just stay indoors bookish people,
although they were that. They were also very fond of
walking and playing outdoors. And the family moved to the
United States in eighteen thirty two when Elizabeth was eleven.
(04:20):
Her father's sugar refinery had burned down and he had
wanted to take a more active part in the fight
against slavery, and the children had all given up sugar
because of the use of slavery and its farming and production.
So yes, ultimately they stopped playing a part in the
practice that they all abhorred. So once they arrived in
(04:41):
the United States, the family started out in New York
and Jersey City, and this is when Elizabeth and her
school aged siblings started going to regular schools for the
first time. The whole family became really involved in the
fight for abolition also, and William Lloyd Garrison, who was
the man behind the anti slavery new paper The Liberator,
became a family friend and a frequent guest in their home,
(05:04):
and when Elizabeth was seventeen, the family moved to Ohio.
A few months after they arrived in Cincinnati, though her
father died, they had already become far less affluent than
they had been in England, and of course before their
refinery burned down, but this left the family without any
kind of financial support. Elizabeth and her two older sisters
(05:25):
started a school for girls, and their oldest brother got
a job in the mayor's office. Together, the four of
them supported the family until the youngest children were also
old enough to work, and the sisters also became politically
active in causes other than abolition, campaigning for greater access
to education for women and girls, UH primarily, and they
(05:47):
also joined the Episcopal Church, and they developed relationships with
Transcendentalists who had moved to Cincinnati from New England. They
kept their school running until eighteen forty two, when enough
of the younger brothers had gone into business that they
didn't need quite so much money, and Elizabeth continued to
teach privately. That year, she was invited to run a
school for girls that was being started in Kentucky, and
(06:10):
she accepted the position and she moved, and that was
a very difficult time for her. She had been kind
of sheltered in her life up to this point, and
Kentucky was a slave state, and living there was really
her first exposure to real world slavery, this thing that
they had in their family been talking about being against
for years and years. And the town that she lived
(06:31):
in was also much poorer and less developed than anywhere
else she had lived, and Elizabeth was expected to begin
teaching pretty much the moment she arrived, so a very
stressful transition. Yeah. She wound up teaching there for three
years before going back to Ohio, joining her family in
a town called Walnut Hills, which was at that point
outside of Cincinnati. It became part of Cincinnati itself a
(06:54):
few years later, in eighteen sixty nine, and when she
returned to Cincinnati, Elizabeth about twenty four and the idea
of being a doctor had still not even entered her
mind at this point. And while she really liked to study,
she was primarily focused on history, metaphysics, German, and music.
But she wanted to do something more and something difficult,
(07:15):
though she was not sure what that thing was. This
is a trade. I kind of love about her. I
think she's kind of like me, and that she always
wanted to tilt at the windmill. She was looking for
another windmill. And the idea to study medicine actually came
from a friend of hers who was dying, and in
her writing, Elizabeth doesn't specifically say what her friend was
(07:36):
dying of. We can kind of into it that it
had something to do with her reproductive system, but in
Elizabeth's words, it's quote delicate nature made the methods of
treatment a constant suffering to her. So Elizabeth's friend thought
that if she had been able to have a woman
doctor instead of a man doctor, that she would have
(07:57):
been spared the most uncomfortable and upsetting part of her treatment.
So Elizabeth's friend thought that a great next thing for
Elizabeth to do to do would be to become a
doctor herself. And Elizabeth's response to her friend's suggestion was
along the lines of what, No, I hate bodies and
everything about them, and I also hate medical textbooks. Uh.
(08:17):
And in her own life, she also hated being sick,
and she found any kind of illness to be sort
of shameful. I identify with all of these things. I
could never do anything medical and illness angers and frustrates me,
and I feel weird shame over it. I don't understand this,
but I acknowledge and recognize it. Yeah. Well, And at
(08:40):
the same time, Elizabeth could not get this thought of
being a doctor out of her mind. She she had
been so much like, Nope, that not for me, but
the idea just kept kind of picking at her. Finally,
a couple of things tipped the scale in favor of
actually going to medical school, and the first was that
she described herself as falling in love a little too easily,
(09:01):
but she didn't like the idea of what marriage would
mean to her life. She concluded that if she became
a doctor, she would never have to get married because
a doctor's life and a traditional wife's life were so
incompatible with each other. Yeah, that is sort of a
wonderful logic. She kind of softened on her view about marriage.
Although she never got married. She kind of kind of
(09:21):
ease back on this idea that like being a wife
was terrible later in her life, but at this point
she was like, you know what, if I were a
doctor too busy for that, I wouldn't have to get married. Uh.
It also became, in her words, a moral struggle. She
really thought the world would be a lot better if
women were allowed to play a more active part in
(09:42):
all aspects of it, one of those things being practicing medicine. Um.
She also wanted to reclaim the word female physician, which
was at this point in history really a euphemism for abortionist,
and Elissenath started asking doctors that her family knew about
how to become a doctor her self. Uh. The idea
of a woman doctor, though, was so unheard of that
(10:04):
she didn't really know where to start, and everyone she
spoke with seemed to think that it was both a
good idea and also basically impossible. Medical schools were for
men only and they were extremely expensive, So Elizabeth started
trying to raise money to study medicine in Paris, which, Uh,
Paris comes up over and over again in this story
(10:24):
is sort of this place that was so off the
rails in terms of morality that maybe they would not
have a problem with a woman's studying medicine. Um, she
thought it might be more acceptable for her to pursue
an education there, but the cost was just enormous, so
she accepted a teaching job in North Carolina, hoping to
save money to pay her way into a school in
(10:48):
the United States. The school's principle had also been a doctor,
and he was going to tutor her in addition to
her doing her teaching duties. All of this was going
to happen in Asheville, which is my favorite place. Yeah. Uh,
did you know that when you selected her? Was it
one of those magical accidents? I did not. Yeah, And
it was one of those things where I was reading
her autobiography and I suddenly was like, I know where
(11:10):
she's talking about. I got very excited. Uh. And the
school that she went to in Aasheville actually disbanded in
eighteen forty six, and at that point she moved to Charleston,
South Carolina, and there she studied with another doctor named
Samuel H. Dickinson, and she also taught music at a
school that was run by someone that Dickinson knew. She
kind of had a lot of favory connections going on
(11:32):
and makings meet and study. Yeah, there was definitely a
combination of her working as a teacher while someone nearby
helped her learn about medicine. Before we get into her
official start of actual medical school, would you like to
take a moment away from our story of this woman
who loved to learn to talk about our new sponsor,
(11:52):
and now let's get back to America's first female m D.
That sounds grand. So by eighteen, Elizabeth finally felt like
she had enough money for medical school, and so she
went to Philadelphia, which was at this point pretty much
the capital of medical instruction in the United States. She
applied to four medical colleges in Philadelphia, and she kept
(12:14):
studying anatomy in a private school, and her journals from
this period described being laughed at, being dismissed, told to
try the New England medical schools, or maybe the ones
in Paris. There was even a Philadelphia medical professor who
told her that while personally he was completely in favor
of women's studying medicine, it was so impossible that the
(12:34):
only way it was ever going to happen was if
she disguised herself as a man. So he was like, no,
I'm cool, but you're going to have to wear a mustache, right,
just so weird in her words. But neither the advice
to go to Paris nor the suggestion of disguise tempted
me for a moment. It was, to my mind a
(12:56):
moral crusade on which I had entered a course of
justice and common sense, and it must be pursued in
the light of day and with public sanction in order
to accomplish its end. That is a woman who has
found her windmill. Uh. And after she exhausted her options
for medical schools in both New York and Philadelphia, she
got a list of smaller medical colleges known as quote
(13:19):
country schools throughout the Northeast, and she chose the twelve
most promising, And she finally got a letter from Geneva University,
which is in western New York, and her application had
been presented to the faculty, which had not really been
in favor of admitting her, but had presented her application
to the students, And so she later received the following documents.
(13:42):
It said, at a meeting of the entire medical class
of Geneva Medical College held this day, October seven. The
following resolutions were unanimously adopted. One resolved that one of
the radical principles of a Republican government is the universal
education of both sexes, That to every branch of scientific education,
(14:04):
the door should be open equally to all, that the
application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our
class meets our entire approbation. And then, extending our unanimous invitation,
we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause
her to regret her attendance at this institution. To resolved
(14:26):
that a copy of these proceedings be signed by the
Chairman and transmitted to Elizabeth Blackwell. Doesn't that sound great?
It really does. It was not actually, uh the there
there were some shenanigans. That was some really good writing.
It was some great writing. So, but the thing is,
the faculty was not super into this idea at all,
(14:49):
and a lot of the students who voted on it
thought that it was a prank being played on them
by a rival college. Oh dear, Yeah, we'll talk about
that more in a second. But you know, long story short,
she got in uh and on November four of eighty seven,
she left Philadelphia to go to Geneva and start medical school,
(15:09):
and overall the other medical students that Geneva welcomed her.
They were courteous and friendly. They would save her a
seat for lectures, and most of the time they treated
her as a friend and a colleague, and she described
the behavior of her male classmates during the two years
that she studied as that of quote true Christian gentleman.
Later on, Elizabeth learned that some of the students had
(15:31):
thought her application was a hoax or a prank being
played on them by rival college as Tracy Sin, But
once they found themselves with an actual female student, they did,
for the most part, live up to what they had
resolved in that letter. Yeah. I think that's where they
kind of rise above the fact that they thought someone
was playing a trick on them. Her teachers mostly traded
her fairly also, although there was some level of consternation
(15:54):
about how to handle anatomy lectures on the reproductive system
when there was a woman in the so occasionally she
was asked to sit out for particular demonstrations, and some
of her anatomical studies were conducted in private. Along with
four of the quote steadier male students, and they pretty
much treated her in these lectures like an older sister.
(16:16):
And the town of Geneva, on the other hand, seemed
to see her as something of an aberration. She was
stared at in the street, and she gradually learned that
people believed she was either immoral or insane. Yeah, they
were pretty much waiting for her to reach some kind
of chipping point and go on a rampage through the
town in some way, like the town did not snap.
(16:37):
She also sometimes did have trouble with the distaste for
the human body that we talked about earlier. She had
always had this. She was not really sure how she
was going to deal with it in medical school, and
she wrote in her journal about some dissections that she
could just barely stand to witness. But this was not
unique to her at all. Some of her male classmates
(16:57):
were just as overcome by them as she was. Not
anything that had anything to do with her sex. No,
And I think even today when you hear stories from
friends that have attended medical school, there is a lot
of like half the people were sick at this lecture
kind of ya. That's not uncommon. Between her first and
second years of school, she went back to Philadelphia, where
(17:18):
she arranged to study in one of the hospital wards
at Blockley Alms House, which was later known as Philadelphia
General Hospital, and in addition to working with Philadelphia's poor,
she also worked with Irish immigrants displaced by the potato famine,
many of whom had typhus, and she actually wound up
writing about typhus for her thesis. They called it ship
fever then, because everybody got it on the ship. Yeah.
(17:42):
This is one of the places where she really started
realizing that a lot of the problems that people were
having in terms of sickness work coming straight from hygiene,
and she became very focused on good hygiene and good
sanitation as being extremely important to people's health. Um. So,
while her classmates at Jenny of A We're pretty much
supportive of the fact that she was there, the doctors
(18:03):
at the alms House really were not. A lot of
the residents would just stop working when she came into
the room. Um and then they stopped writing patients diagnoses
on their charts to basically make it harder for her.
She was she wasn't there as a doctor, She was
there as an observer, and they were basically trying to
make it so she didn't really have a lot to observe.
(18:24):
I'm just wondering how that would figure into, for example,
your hippocratic oath, where you're supposed to be doing everything
you can to take care of a person, and then
you let this petty stuff get in the way. That's
a great question. Elizabeth returned to Geneva after the summer,
and she graduated at the top of her class in
eighteen forty nine, becoming the first woman to earn an
empty from an American medical school. And before we talk
(18:47):
about what happened after medical school, let's take another moment
and talk about our other sponsor today. That sounds fabulous
do So to get back to Dr Blackwell, as she
is now, Dr Blackwell, she wanted to become, in her words,
the first lady surgeon in the world, and she realized
that the education she was going to need to do
this was still really not open to her in the
(19:07):
United States. But fortunately some of her cousins who lived
in England had been visiting the US and they invited
her to go back to Europe with them, and so
she went abroad, studying medicine in London and Paris for
two years, and she also studied midwiffery while they're at
La Maternity, which is a school for training midwives. This
was both very difficult and very rewarding. She had very
(19:31):
little privacy, It's kind of a near monastic experience, and
because of the nature of midwiffery, she did not get
very much sleep. She did, though, get an enormous amount
of hands on experience in a very condensed time frame,
and a lot of this influenced her practice later, and
it also kept hammering home on the fact that hygiene
(19:53):
and sanitation were lacking in the world, which needed to
be fixed and unfortunate. Uh This work and these revelations
are also what derailed her from her plans to become
a surgeon. One day, while she was treating a baby
that had an eye infection caused by gnarrhea, some of
the water that she was using splashed into her own eye,
(20:14):
which became infected as well. She asked for permission to
leave until it got better, and at first she was denied,
but then when Monsieur Blott, the intern, realized what was happening,
he talked to the chief physician who examined her and
told her to stop work immediately and be treated. This
effect on her eyesight was pretty much immediate. She she
couldn't see very well out of it. It was extremely inflamed.
(20:36):
In addition to the fact that she couldn't see very well,
it uh like it was disturbing to other people to
look at. It was just a very uh frightening looking infection.
But Dr Blackwell was hopeful that this was temporary and
that with treatment it would get better. She continued to
have flare ups though, and ultimately the eye had to
be removed and replaced with a glass one, and that
(20:58):
pretty much made a surgical career impossible. She decided to
return to London in eighteen fifty and the cousin wrote
to introduce her to the St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and while
studying there, she met and worked with the famous Florence Nightingale,
the founder of modern nursing. They were pretty much contemporaries.
We could have a whole episode on their relationship with
(21:18):
each other. Uh they did not always see eyed eye
completely on things. Um So Dr Blackwell wanted to practice
in London, but she didn't have a lot of money.
She didn't have a huge network of family and friends
to support her. She ultimately went back to the United States,
hoping that she could save enough money to go back
to England in ten or fifteen years, and she went
(21:40):
to New York and she started along and uphill battle
of trying to build her own practice. And while the
students at Geneva had welcomed her, the medical community was
deeply reluctant to associate with her in any way. The
first people she actually became friends with were Quakers, and
the Quaker community helped her find locations where she could
practice medicine and deliver like rs on women's health. And
(22:01):
she described her practice in those years as a very
Quaker one. There's a sort of a thread of different
religious influences that tracks through her whole life, with this
being sort of the most recent Quaker faith. She did
not have very much medical companionship because the other doctors
were just really suspicious of a woman practicing medicine, and
(22:26):
so she didn't have much opportunity to learn from other
doctors either. Patients also resisted the idea of seeing a woman,
and she was such a lonely existence overall that in
October of eighteen fifty four, she took in a seven
year old orphaned girl who she later adopted, and that
same year doctor Blackwell's sister, Emily graduated from the Medical
(22:48):
College of Cleveland. She went on to study in Europe
as well, and when she returned, the sisters started a
dispensary together. It was clear that the doctor's Blackwell were
pretty much gonna have to make their own opportunit tunities
for their practice and for furthering their own medical education,
So the two of them collaborated with Dr Marie Zakrazuska,
(23:08):
who and they together opened the New York Infirmary for
Women and Children in eighteen fifty seven. They basically rented
a house and then outfitted it for their own purposes.
This wasn't just a medical facility. It was also a
place that other women who were doctors and wanted to
become doctors could find additional work in the training that
Dr Blackwell herself had not had a lot of success
(23:32):
finding in the United States, and this, as you can imagine,
was another uphill struggle. In an annual report listed all
of the objections that the women had encountered. They were
told that no one would let a house for the
purpose that female doctors should be looked upon with so
much suspicion that the police would interfere, that if deaths occurred,
(23:52):
their death certificates would not be recognized, that they would
be resorted to by classes and persons whom it would
be an insult to be called upon to deal with.
As my personal side, I once again have a hippocratic
oath question mark. There uh that without men as resident physicians,
they would not be able to control the patients, That
if any accident occurred, not only the medical profession but
(24:14):
the public would blame the trustees for supporting such an undertaking.
And finally, that they would never be able to collect
money enough for so unpopular an effort giant windmill. They
made it anyway. Their infirmary eventually flourished. They provided medical
care and instruction, and they taught poor women how to
(24:34):
care for their children. And this really went on until
the start of the Civil War. At that point, Dr
Blackwell founded the Women's Central Association of Relief or the
w c a R, which focused on training women to
be nurses for injured soldiers and on collecting medical supplies.
In eighteen sixty seven, so after the war ended, the
infirmary opened its own medical college, and by this time
(24:58):
access to medical education and pray. This was vastly different
for women in the United States, but it still had
a really long way to go. Many medical programs either
admitted women to their programs or were exclusively for women,
although these were generally inferior to men's colleges. Hospitals and
other facilities were also more open to employing women, although
(25:18):
the opportunities were still not really numerous, uh, and there
were still schools that stridently worked against women as students,
including her alma mater, which rejected Dr Blackwell's sister, which
I find fascinating. Yeah, it seems like that like that
worked out great, We're never doing it again. Dr Blackwell
eventually returned to England again in eighteen sixty nine, and
(25:41):
what she was hoping to do was to stay there
a long time and practice medicine. She did wind up
living there for the rest of her life, but her
health started to decline not long after she arrived. She
was forced to take a lot of time off to recuperate,
and by the eighteen seventies she stopped practicing entirely, though
she did continue you to campaign for opportunities for women
(26:02):
in medicine, and she continued to work towards social reform.
She died in nineteen ten, a couple of years after
a pretty bad fall had had really caused her a
lot of physical and mental issues, and at that point
she had paved the way for a whole new career
path for women. She really had. Uh we we haven't
(26:22):
really talked about a lot of the actual medicine that
she was practicing. Some of that is sort of saw
bones territory if you haven't given that podcast a listen yet.
For example, when she like when her own eye infection
was being treated, which is like, this is an infection
that was pretty common at the time. It was it
was something would happen to babies when they were born
(26:43):
to a woman who had gnaria um. Like the treatment
involved leeches on her head. Uh, not very effective at
treating an eye infection caused by ganeria grow. Yeah, there
was a lot of stuff that was kind of gross,
and a lot of the medicine that was being taught
at that point is actually pretty not recognized as medicine today.
(27:07):
But like that that was the state of medicine, and
she helped make it a place where women also could
learn and practice. Um, we didn't. We also didn't talk
a whole lot about all of her other social reform
efforts that went on in conjunction with her medical practice
and afterwards. That could be a whole other episode. There
was a lot of that to you. WHOA, well, why
(27:30):
we think about whether or not that will become an episode?
Do you want to read some listener mail for us?
I would. I have listener mail that's from Victoria and
she says, high ladies, I've just finished listening to your
Jane Austin podcast and you mentioned the history book that
she wrote before Penning Eleanor and Maryanne had to email
you because I think I actually own a copy of
this very book. The inside cover states that she wrote
it in seventeen nine, which would be six years before
(27:52):
Pride and Prejudice, when she was sixteen. It's very short,
only about fifteen pages, but utterly delightful, and I think
you would love it if you have read it already.
I particularly adore the title, which is the history of
England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian, and then
it says there will be very few dates in this history,
(28:15):
which is I feel that way in page history. Yeah, sure,
how deep he could go? Actually feel that way about
our episodes. Sometimes there are very few dates in our
episodes sometimes because it just becomes dates, soup and the
There are other things that we can talk about besides
a whole long list of dates. Um so, yes, Victoria, Uh,
you can find this on the internet. Also if you
(28:38):
want the very brief and very biased history of England,
which is pretty great. Um so, yes, we will put
a link to that in our shore notes. I pretty
quickly was able to dig it up on the internet.
Victoria was like, I've read this. I was like, you know,
probably find that easy. Uh. And then she signs off
as Vicky. So perhaps I should have called Vicky that
at the beginning. Perhaps thank you very much for writing
(29:01):
to us. Vicky. You have sounded like a disappointed mom
to begin with. I am often a disappointed mom when
I when I mess myself up somehow. Uh So, anyway,
thank you Vicky for writing to us. If you would
like to write to us, you can. We're at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at
Facebook dot com slash missed in History and on Twitter
(29:22):
at miss in History. A tumbler is missed in History
dot tumbler dot com. Our pinterest is pinterest dot com
slash miss in history. If you're wondering why we've used
miss in history so many times for so many different aliases,
it is to match our brand new website. Yes, it's
all sparkly and fresh. It is called www dot miss
in history dot com. You can listen to every single
(29:43):
episode we've ever done on the website. It's much easier
to search our blog. Yeah, are we're We're slowly the tagging.
We're We're going to be working on tagging episodes for
a while, I think, But once they are all tagged,
there will be many, many things that you can click
if you want to see everything that's about shipwrecks, or
it's about pirates, or everything that's about sad royal childhoods
(30:03):
or various other things that we talk about often. Yeah,
so yes, that is missed in History dot com. If
you want to come pay us a visit. If you
would like to learn more about what we talked about today,
you can come to our website. Just put the word
Blackwell in our search bar and you will find how
Ladies Aid Societies worked, which talks about UH the ladies
(30:24):
aid societies that flourished during this period in history, and
there's a page on Dr Blackwell and her work during
the Civil War. You can do all that and a
whole lot more at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it
has stuff works dot com, Netflix streams TV shows and
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