As a joke, they voted "yes," and she gained admittance, despite the reluctance of most students and faculty. Two years later, in , Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to receive an M.
When Blackwell lost sight in one eye, she returned to New York City in , giving up her dream of becoming a surgeon. Elizabeth Blackwell established a practice in New York City, but had few patients and few opportunities for intellectual exchange with other physicians and "the means of increasing medical knowledge which dispensary practice affords.
In , with the help of friends, she opened her own dispensary in a single rented room, seeing patients three afternoons a week. The dispensary was incorporated in and moved to a small house she bought on 15th Street. Her sister, Dr. Emily Blackwell, joined her in and, together with Dr. This institution and its medical college for women opened provided training and experience for women doctors and medical care for the poor.
Inspired by her sister, Emily Blackwell decided to follow Elizabeth into medicine. The two sisters teamed up on multiple occasions over the course of their careers. And when the Civil War broke out in , Emily and Elizabeth trained women nurses for the Union Army, despite meeting resistance from male army doctors.
Though Elizabeth left the infirmary just two years after its establishment, Emily stayed on to manage the institution. She oversaw the infirmary for the next 40 years, staffing it with women and growing it to treat more than patients per year.
Initially, Blackwell planned to become a surgeon. But after a medical accident left her blind in one eye not long after graduating from medical school, she was forced to take a different path. After working for years both in private practice and, later, in her infirmary, she launched a women-only medical college in Five years after returning to her native England, she helped establish the London School of Medicine for Women in —5. She taught there as a professor of gynecology until an injury forced her to retire in Elizabeth Blackwell was a British physician and the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
As a girl, she moved with her family to the United States, where she first worked as a teacher. Despite widespread opposition, she later decided to attend medical college and graduated first in her class. She created a medical school for women in the late s, eventually returning to England and setting up a private practice. Physician and educator Blackwell was born on February 3, , in Bristol, England.
Brought up in a liberal household that stressed education, Blackwell eventually broke into the field of medicine to become the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States. While in her mids, Blackwell had a friend suffering from a terminal disease who had felt embarrassed going to male doctors, lamenting that she would have fared better having a female physician.
Deeply affected by her friend's words and struggling with an affair of the heart as well, Blackwell opted to pursue a career in medicine. But the road to becoming a doctor was not an easy one. As some other women did at the time, she studied independently with doctors before getting accepted in to Geneva Medical College in upstate New York. Her acceptance was deemed by the student body as an administrative practical joke. Yet a serious Blackwell showed up to pursue her studies, with her admittance creating community uproar due to the prejudices of the time over women receiving a formal education in medicine.
She was ostracized by educators and patients alike at times, though it was also reported that uncouth male students became particularly studious and mature in her presence. Blackwell held firm despite myriad challenges, earning the respect of many of her peers and eventually writing her doctoral thesis on typhus fever. Ranked first in her class, Blackwell graduated in , becoming the first woman to become a doctor of medicine in the contemporary era.
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