(1821-1910), physician, reformer, and medical educator. Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States or Europe. She was also active in moral reform, an interest that antedated her attraction to medicine. In part this was due to her remarkable family, English immigrants who moved to America when Elizabeth was eleven and immersed themselves in Christian perfectionism and reformist activity. Elizabeth's brothers, Henry and Samuel, supported antislavery and women's rights: the former married the feminist Lucy Stone and the latter married Antoinette Brown, the first formally ordained woman minister in the United States. Sister Emily also became a physician, and another, Anna, a poet and translator.
Studying medicine did not come easily to Blackwell, but she longed for engrossing, ennobling activity. When a woman friend, dying of cancer, urged that her own situation would have been eased immeasurably by the attendance of a woman doctor, Blackwell determined to make medicine her calling.
She was forced to study privately for several years while she searched for a school that would train her. Geneva Medical College in upstate New York finally accepted her after a reluctant faculty hinged her admission on the unanimous agreement of the student body, and the men, partially as a practical joke, voted her in without protest. After receiving her degree in 1849, she studied in Paris and London, returning to New York City in 1851 to hang out her shingle.
Ignored by medical colleagues and mistrusted by patients, she found her first years lonely and discouraging. In 1856 she was joined by her sister Emily and Marie Zakrzewska, both of whom had recently graduated from Western Reserve Medical School. The following year the three expanded Blackwell's dispensary into a hospital, the still-extant New York Infirmary for Women and Children. A decade later came the hospital's medical school for women, an institutional showcase that trained hundreds of women doctors before merging with Cornell in 1899.
Blackwell was an eloquent spokesperson for the women's medical movement in the United States and England, where she settled permanently in 1869. These years saw her concentrate increasingly on medical reform. Her holistic approach to disease led her to believe that the physician must not merely cure but bring about scientific social reform. Sharing with many feminists of the time the belief that women innately possess a higher moral sense than men do, she saw their role in medicine as integral to the proper and healthy progress of the profession as a whole. All physicians, she believed, must display the nurturing qualities she termed "the spiritual power of maternity" and should monitor medical progress so that it would not violate moral truth.
At the end of her career she became progressively more uncomfortable with the new medical reductionism inspired by advances in bacteriology and laboratory medicine. When she died, her moralism appeared anachronistic to a younger generation of physicians turning with mounting enthusiasm toward the apparent objective absolutes of laboratory science and technocratic care.
Bibliography:
Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895; reprint, 1977); Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (1985).
Author:
Regina Morantz-Sanchez
See also
Feminist Movement; Medicine.
