Blackwell Breaks Barriers: First U.S. Female Doctor
Elizabeth Blackwell applied to twenty-nine medical schools before Geneva Medical College in upstate New York accepted her in 1847, and even that acceptance was a joke. The faculty, unsure how to handle a woman's application, put it to a student vote expecting a unanimous rejection. The all-male student body, thinking the application was a prank from a rival school, voted unanimously to admit her. Blackwell proved them wrong by graduating first in her class in 1849. She then traveled to Paris and London for surgical training, losing sight in one eye after contracting ophthalmia from a patient. Undeterred, she returned to New York and opened the first hospital staffed entirely by women, the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, in 1857. Her insistence on hygiene standards anticipated germ theory by a decade.
January 23, 1849
177 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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