August 24, 2019 • 28 mins
Today we revisit a 2014 episode. 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Coming up this week, we have a
podcast on Sarah JOSETTEA. Hail and the episode is focused
primarily on her work editing women's magazines, including Goadie's Ladies Book.
One of the things that comes up in that is
her support of Elizabeth Blackwell and becoming the first woman
to earn an m d in the US. And since
we don't really get into Blackwell at all in that episode,
(00:24):
we thought we should go back to our March episode
on her for today's Saturday Classics, So enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History class a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:46):
I'm Tracy Willson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, did you
know that, according to the American Medical Association of Physicians
in America today are women. I did not know that.
It 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
(01:08):
of the GPS that like I've seen in the last
I don't know decade, even in the listings, I remember
searching 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. Well.
And I remember earlier this year when my uh, when
my general my GP was on maternity leave, the person
(01:32):
answering the phone at the practice said, well, our other
female doctor is And I was like, what do you
mean our other female doctor? There are 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
(01:57):
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
(02:19):
work in medicine for women. And she was also a
social reformer. And she's who were 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
(02:40):
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. Pretty cool. It is funny to think
about because even today, most people that want to be
(03:01):
doctors know it at a really early age, and that
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 beginning.
(03:21):
So 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 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,
(03:46):
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 it's
a conflicted situation. They were in a knowingly yucky situation
where they were they were vehemently against this practice, and
(04:07):
yet that practice was 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,
(04:30):
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.
(04:53):
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 in its farming and production.
So yes, ultimately they stopped playing a part in the
practice that they all abhorred. So once they arrived in
(05:13):
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 newspaper The Liberator, became
(05:33):
a family friend and a frequent guest in their home,
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
(05:57):
started a school for girls, and they're this 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
(06:19):
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
(06:42):
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
(07:03):
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 the 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
(07:27):
few years later in eighteen sixty nine, and when she
returned to Cincinnati, Elizabeth was 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, though she was not sure what that thing was.
(07:50):
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 dying of. We can kind of into it that
(08:11):
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 been spared the most uncomfortable and upsetting parts of
(08:32):
her treatment. So Elizabeth's friend thought that a great next
thing for Elizabeth 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.
And in her own life, she also hated being sick,
and she found any kind of illness to be sort
(08:54):
of shameful. I identify with all of these things, right, Like,
I could never do anything medical, and the 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 the same time, Elizabeth could not get this
thought of being a doctor out of her mind. She
(09:16):
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,
but she didn't like the idea of what marriage would
mean to her life. She concluded that if she became
(09:39):
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 that a sort of a wonderful logic.
She kind of softened on her view about marriage, although
she never got married. She kind of kind of ease
back on this idea that like being a wife was
terrible later in her life, but at this point she
(09:59):
was like, you know, but 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
all aspects of it, one of those things being practicing medicine. Um.
She also wanted to reclaim the word female physician, which
(10:23):
was at this point in history really a euphemism for abortionist,
and Elizabeth started asking doctors that her family knew about
how to become a doctor herself. Uh. The idea of
a woman doctor, though, was so unheard of that 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,
(10:46):
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, a
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 studying medicine. Um, she thought
(11:07):
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 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
(11:30):
to happen in Asheville, which is my favorite place. Yeah, Uh,
did you know that when you selected her? Or was
it one of those magical accidents. I did not, And
it was one of those things that I was reading
her autobiography and I suddenly was like, I know where
she's talking about. I got very excited. Uh. And the
school that she went to in Nashville actually disbanded in
eighteen forty six, and at that point she moved to Charleston,
(11:52):
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
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. So by eight Elizabeth finally
(12:25):
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 studying anatomy in a private school, and her journals
from this period described being laughed at, being dismissed told
(12:45):
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 studying medicine, it was so impossible that
the 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,
(13:08):
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
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
(13:29):
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
country schools throughout the Northeast, and she chose the twelve
most promising, And she finally got a letter from Geneva University,
(13:51):
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 document.
It said, at a meeting of the entire medical class
of Geneva Medical College, held this day, October forty seven,
(14:14):
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, 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 in extending
(14:39):
our unanimous invitation, we pledge ourselves that no conduct of
ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.
Two resolved 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,
(15:01):
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, 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
(15:21):
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. And overall, the other medical
students that Geneva welcomed her. They were courteous and friendly.
They would save her seat for lectures, and most of
the time they treated her as a friend and a colleague.
(15:44):
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 thought her application was a hoax or
a prank being played on them by Arrival College. Is
Tracy said. But once I found themselves with an actual
female student, they did, for the most part, live up
(16:04):
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 about how to handle anatomy lectures
on the reproductive system when there was a woman in
the room. So occasionally she was asked to sit out
(16:26):
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, and the town of Geneva,
on the other hand, seemed to see her as something
of an admiration. She was stared at in the street,
(16:46):
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 tipping point and go
on a rampage through the town in some way, like
the town did not trust her to snap. She also
sometimes did have trouble with the distaste for the human
body that we talked about earlier. She had always had this.
(17:09):
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 were just as
overcome by them as she was. Was not anything that
had anything to do with her sex. No, And I
think even today when you hear stories from friends that
(17:31):
have attended medical school, there is a lot of like
half the people were sick at this lecture. Kind of
that's not uncommon. Between our first and second years of school,
she went back to Philadelphia, where 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
(17:52):
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. This was one
of the places where she really started realizing that a
lot of the problems that people were having in terms
of sickness were coming straight from hygiene, and she became
(18:14):
very focused on good hygiene and good sanitation as being
extremely important to people's health. Um So, while her classmates
at Geneva were pretty much supportive of the fact that
she was there, the doctors at the Almshouse really were not.
A lot of the residents would just stop working when
she came into the room. Um, and then they stopped
(18:34):
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. 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
(18:56):
and then you let this petty stuff get in the way.
That's a great question. Eizabeth's 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
m d from an American medical school. So to get
(19:18):
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 United States. But
fortunately some of her cousins who lived in England had
been visiting the US, and they invited her to go
(19:38):
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 Limaternita, which is
a school for training midwives. So it was both very
difficult and very rewarding. She had very little privacy. It's
kind of a near monastic experience, and because of nature
(20:00):
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 and sanitation were lacking in the world,
(20:21):
which needed to be fixed. And unfortunately, 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
gna rhea, some of the water that she was using
splashed into her own eye, which became infected as well.
She asked for permission to leave until it got better,
(20:43):
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. In addition to
the fact that she couldn't see very well, it uh
(21:03):
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 I had to be
removed and replaced with a glass one, and that pretty
much made a surgical career impossible. She decided to return
(21:26):
to London in eighteen fifty and a 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 each other. Uh.
They did not always see eyed eye completely on things.
(21:48):
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 to New
York and she started along and uphill battle of trying
to build her own practice. And while the students at
(22:10):
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 lectures on women's health. And she described her
practice in those years as a very Quaker one. Yeah,
(22:30):
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 so she
didn't have much opportunity to learn from other doctors either.
(22:54):
Patients also resisted the idea of seeing a woman, and
she was such a only 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 Dr Blackwell's sister, Emily graduated from the Medical College
of Cleveland. She went on to study in Europe as well,
(23:15):
and when she returned, the sisters started a dispensary together.
It was clear that the doctor's Blackwell were pretty much
going to have to make their own opportunities for their
practice and for furthering their own medical education, so the
two of them collaborated with Dr Marie Zakrazuska, who and
they together opened the New York Infirmary for Women and
(23:36):
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 finding in
(23:56):
the United States, and this, as you can imagine, was
in other uphill struggle in an annual report elicted 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, their
(24:16):
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
(24:38):
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
(24:58):
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,
(25:22):
access to medical education and practice 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 the
(25:42):
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. Dad. It seems like that worked out great.
We're never doing it again. Dr Blackwell eventually returned to
(26:03):
England again in eighteen sixty nine, and 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 to campaign for opportunities for women in medicine, and
(26:27):
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 really talked about
(26:47):
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 infection was being treated,
which is like, this is an infection that was pretty
common at the time. It was it was something that
would happen to babies when they were born to a
(27:07):
woman who had gnaria um, Like the treatment involved leeches
on her head. Uh, not very effective at treating an
eye infection caused by ganaia. Kind of gross. 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,
(27:31):
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 too. Thank you so much
(27:58):
for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard
an email address or a Facebook you are l or
something similar over the course of today's episode, since it
is from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at history podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
(28:21):
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Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. Coming up this week, we have a
podcast on Sarah JOSETTEA. Hail and the episode is focused
primarily on her work editing women's magazines, including Goadie's Ladies Book.
One of the things that comes up in that is
her support of Elizabeth Blackwell and becoming the first woman
to earn an m d in the US. And since
we don't really get into Blackwell at all in that episode,
(00:24):
we thought we should go back to our March episode
on her for today's Saturday Classics, So enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History class a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:46):
I'm Tracy Willson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, did you
know that, according to the American Medical Association of Physicians
in America today are women. I did not know that.
It 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
(01:08):
of the GPS that like I've seen in the last
I don't know decade, even in the listings, I remember
searching 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. Well.
And I remember earlier this year when my uh, when
my general my GP was on maternity leave, the person
(01:32):
answering the phone at the practice said, well, our other
female doctor is And I was like, what do you
mean our other female doctor? There are 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
(01:57):
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
(02:19):
work in medicine for women. And she was also a
social reformer. And she's who were 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
(02:40):
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. Pretty cool. It is funny to think
about because even today, most people that want to be
(03:01):
doctors know it at a really early age, and that
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 beginning.
(03:21):
So 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 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,
(03:46):
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 it's
a conflicted situation. They were in a knowingly yucky situation
where they were they were vehemently against this practice, and
(04:07):
yet that practice was 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,
(04:30):
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.
(04:53):
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 in its farming and production.
So yes, ultimately they stopped playing a part in the
practice that they all abhorred. So once they arrived in
(05:13):
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 newspaper The Liberator, became
(05:33):
a family friend and a frequent guest in their home,
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
(05:57):
started a school for girls, and they're this 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
(06:19):
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
(06:42):
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
(07:03):
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 the 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
(07:27):
few years later in eighteen sixty nine, and when she
returned to Cincinnati, Elizabeth was 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, though she was not sure what that thing was.
(07:50):
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 dying of. We can kind of into it that
(08:11):
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 been spared the most uncomfortable and upsetting parts of
(08:32):
her treatment. So Elizabeth's friend thought that a great next
thing for Elizabeth 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.
And in her own life, she also hated being sick,
and she found any kind of illness to be sort
(08:54):
of shameful. I identify with all of these things, right, Like,
I could never do anything medical, and the 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 the same time, Elizabeth could not get this
thought of being a doctor out of her mind. She
(09:16):
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,
but she didn't like the idea of what marriage would
mean to her life. She concluded that if she became
(09:39):
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 that a sort of a wonderful logic.
She kind of softened on her view about marriage, although
she never got married. She kind of kind of ease
back on this idea that like being a wife was
terrible later in her life, but at this point she
(09:59):
was like, you know, but 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
all aspects of it, one of those things being practicing medicine. Um.
She also wanted to reclaim the word female physician, which
(10:23):
was at this point in history really a euphemism for abortionist,
and Elizabeth started asking doctors that her family knew about
how to become a doctor herself. Uh. The idea of
a woman doctor, though, was so unheard of that 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,
(10:46):
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, a
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 studying medicine. Um, she thought
(11:07):
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 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
(11:30):
to happen in Asheville, which is my favorite place. Yeah, Uh,
did you know that when you selected her? Or was
it one of those magical accidents. I did not, And
it was one of those things that I was reading
her autobiography and I suddenly was like, I know where
she's talking about. I got very excited. Uh. And the
school that she went to in Nashville actually disbanded in
eighteen forty six, and at that point she moved to Charleston,
(11:52):
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
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. So by eight Elizabeth finally
(12:25):
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 studying anatomy in a private school, and her journals
from this period described being laughed at, being dismissed told
(12:45):
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 studying medicine, it was so impossible that
the 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,
(13:08):
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
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
(13:29):
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
country schools throughout the Northeast, and she chose the twelve
most promising, And she finally got a letter from Geneva University,
(13:51):
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 document.
It said, at a meeting of the entire medical class
of Geneva Medical College, held this day, October forty seven,
(14:14):
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, 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 in extending
(14:39):
our unanimous invitation, we pledge ourselves that no conduct of
ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.
Two resolved 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,
(15:01):
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, 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
(15:21):
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. And overall, the other medical
students that Geneva welcomed her. They were courteous and friendly.
They would save her seat for lectures, and most of
the time they treated her as a friend and a colleague.
(15:44):
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 thought her application was a hoax or
a prank being played on them by Arrival College. Is
Tracy said. But once I found themselves with an actual
female student, they did, for the most part, live up
(16:04):
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 about how to handle anatomy lectures
on the reproductive system when there was a woman in
the room. So occasionally she was asked to sit out
(16:26):
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, and the town of Geneva,
on the other hand, seemed to see her as something
of an admiration. She was stared at in the street,
(16:46):
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 tipping point and go
on a rampage through the town in some way, like
the town did not trust her to snap. She also
sometimes did have trouble with the distaste for the human
body that we talked about earlier. She had always had this.
(17:09):
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 were just as
overcome by them as she was. Was not anything that
had anything to do with her sex. No, And I
think even today when you hear stories from friends that
(17:31):
have attended medical school, there is a lot of like
half the people were sick at this lecture. Kind of
that's not uncommon. Between our first and second years of school,
she went back to Philadelphia, where 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
(17:52):
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. This was one
of the places where she really started realizing that a
lot of the problems that people were having in terms
of sickness were coming straight from hygiene, and she became
(18:14):
very focused on good hygiene and good sanitation as being
extremely important to people's health. Um So, while her classmates
at Geneva were pretty much supportive of the fact that
she was there, the doctors at the Almshouse really were not.
A lot of the residents would just stop working when
she came into the room. Um, and then they stopped
(18:34):
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. 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
(18:56):
and then you let this petty stuff get in the way.
That's a great question. Eizabeth's 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
m d from an American medical school. So to get
(19:18):
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 United States. But
fortunately some of her cousins who lived in England had
been visiting the US, and they invited her to go
(19:38):
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 Limaternita, which is
a school for training midwives. So it was both very
difficult and very rewarding. She had very little privacy. It's
kind of a near monastic experience, and because of nature
(20:00):
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 and sanitation were lacking in the world,
(20:21):
which needed to be fixed. And unfortunately, 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
gna rhea, some of the water that she was using
splashed into her own eye, which became infected as well.
She asked for permission to leave until it got better,
(20:43):
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. In addition to
the fact that she couldn't see very well, it uh
(21:03):
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 I had to be
removed and replaced with a glass one, and that pretty
much made a surgical career impossible. She decided to return
(21:26):
to London in eighteen fifty and a 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 each other. Uh.
They did not always see eyed eye completely on things.
(21:48):
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 to New
York and she started along and uphill battle of trying
to build her own practice. And while the students at
(22:10):
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 lectures on women's health. And she described her
practice in those years as a very Quaker one. Yeah,
(22:30):
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 so she
didn't have much opportunity to learn from other doctors either.
(22:54):
Patients also resisted the idea of seeing a woman, and
she was such a only 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 Dr Blackwell's sister, Emily graduated from the Medical College
of Cleveland. She went on to study in Europe as well,
(23:15):
and when she returned, the sisters started a dispensary together.
It was clear that the doctor's Blackwell were pretty much
going to have to make their own opportunities for their
practice and for furthering their own medical education, so the
two of them collaborated with Dr Marie Zakrazuska, who and
they together opened the New York Infirmary for Women and
(23:36):
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 finding in
(23:56):
the United States, and this, as you can imagine, was
in other uphill struggle in an annual report elicted 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, their
(24:16):
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
(24:38):
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
(24:58):
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,
(25:22):
access to medical education and practice 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 the
(25:42):
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. Dad. It seems like that worked out great.
We're never doing it again. Dr Blackwell eventually returned to
(26:03):
England again in eighteen sixty nine, and 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 to campaign for opportunities for women in medicine, and
(26:27):
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 really talked about
(26:47):
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 infection was being treated,
which is like, this is an infection that was pretty
common at the time. It was it was something that
would happen to babies when they were born to a
(27:07):
woman who had gnaria um, Like the treatment involved leeches
on her head. Uh, not very effective at treating an
eye infection caused by ganaia. Kind of gross. 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,
(27:31):
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 too. Thank you so much
(27:58):
for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard
an email address or a Facebook you are l or
something similar over the course of today's episode, since it
is from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at history podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
(28:21):
Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
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