Elizabeth Blackwell

Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, on February 3, 1821, one of nine children in a family her father ran on unusually democratic lines, insisting sons and daughters develop their talents alike. A fire destroyed his sugar refinery in 1832 and the family sailed for New York; his death five years later, when she was seventeen, left them scraping by on a school she and her sisters opened in Cincinnati. She taught afterward in Kentucky and the Carolinas and might have stayed a teacher, but a dying friend told her the ordeal would have gone easier with a woman doctor. Eleven medical schools refused her. The twelfth, Geneva Medical College, put her admission to a vote of its all-male students as a joke, and the vote came back unanimous.

She earned her degree on January 23, 1849, from Geneva, becoming the first woman in the United States to hold one; the dean stood and bowed as he handed it over. Paris would only take her as a student midwife, and there, in November, splashed fluid from an infant's eye infection blinded her own left eye and ended any chance of surgery. She practiced in London next, then returned to New York in 1851 to a profession that would not have her — so she built her own institution, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, in 1857, staffed and governed entirely by women, with a four-year medical college attached by 1868. She organized nurse training during the Civil War, then moved to London in 1869 and helped found the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874.

She never married, telling one suitor she had found in him only 'about a sixth' of a whole. In 1856 she adopted Kitty Barry, an Irish orphan from a New York asylum, and raised her, in her biographers' assessment, as 'half-servant, half-daughter' — giving her an education but introducing her to no friends her own age. Blackwell's medicine, meanwhile, moved away from where the field was going. She distrusted vaccination, was skeptical that germs explained as much disease as doctors claimed, and argued Christian morality belonged in medical training as much as science did. She quarreled with Florence Nightingale over nurse training, split bitterly from her own sister and co-founder Emily, and fell out in turn with three of the women she had mentored into the profession she had opened.

A fall down a staircase in Scotland in 1907 left her disabled at 86; she died three years later, on May 31, 1910, at her Hastings home after a stroke, and her ashes went into the churchyard at Kilmun. Kitty Barry, who had spent 54 years as her ward, called her 'my true love' on her own deathbed in 1936 and asked to be buried beside her. Honors followed: the American Medical Women's Association has given an Elizabeth Blackwell Medal since 1949, February 3 is National Women Physicians Day, and in 2025 SUNY Upstate Medical University, once Geneva Medical College, put up a statue. Her actual medical opinions — against vaccination, against germ theory's reach — did not survive with her name.

Elizabeth Blackwell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Causes and Treatment of Typhus, or Shipfever article
  Her graduation thesis, published in the Buffalo Medical Journal 1849
• The Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls book 1852
• New York Infirmary for Women and Children company
  Staffed and governed entirely by women, with a four-year medical college attached by 1868 1857
• London School of Medicine for Women company
  Co-founded with Sophia Jex-Blake 1874
• Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women book
  Her autobiography — it sold fewer than 500 copies 1895

• 1832 aged ~11 Emigrates with her family to New York after a fire destroys her father's refinery
• October 1847 aged 26 Is admitted to Geneva Medical College after a joke vote by its students Eleven other schools had already refused her.
• January 23, 1849 aged 27 Becomes the first woman in the US to earn a medical degree
• November 4, 1849 aged 28 Loses sight in her left eye treating an infant in Paris The infection ended any chance of becoming a surgeon.
• 1857 aged ~36 Opens the New York Infirmary for Women and Children
• 1868 aged ~47 Adds a four-year women's medical college to the infirmary
• 1874 aged ~53 Helps found the London School of Medicine for Women
• May 31, 1910 aged 89 Dies at her home in Hastings, England, after a stroke

• Dorothea Dix 1802–1887
  Social reformer who championed humane treatment of the mentally ill and established asylums nationwide. trained nurses alongside
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. corresponded with