Elizabeth Blackwell: The First

In eighteen forty-seven, Elizabeth Blackwell applied to every medical school she could find in the northeastern United States and was rejected by every one of them except Geneva Medical College, in Geneva, New York. The faculty at Geneva decided to put the question of her admission to the student body, perhaps expecting the young men would vote to exclude her. The students voted to accept her, reportedly treating it partly as a joke. She arrived in the fall of eighteen forty-seven and did not treat it as a joke.

Blackwell had been born in Bristol, England in eighteen twenty-one and had come to the United States as a child. She had decided to pursue medicine after a close friend, dying of a painful condition, told her that a woman physician would have made her treatment more bearable. Every institution she approached told her the same thing: women did not study medicine. Geneva, almost by accident, said otherwise.

She graduated on January twenty-third, eighteen forty-nine, ranked first in her class. The dean of the college, Charles Lee, is said to have stood and bowed to her as he conferred her degree. The townspeople of Geneva had been less welcoming throughout her time there, and she faced social ostracism from women who regarded her as something outside the normal categories.

After Geneva, Blackwell helped found the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, one of the first hospitals staffed by women physicians. She later became the first woman on the British Medical Register. A monument to her stands in Geneva today, and her name appears in the history of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which grew out of Geneva College, home of the old medical school.