graduated from Geneva Medical College. She was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. Although Blackwell had been studying medicine on her own for four years when she began applying to medical schools, Geneva Medical College, a forerunner of Hobart College in upstate New York, was the only institution to accept her application. She entered the college in 1847 and graduated the head of her class two years later, despite having endured ostracism by students and townspeople for daring to challenge barriers against women in the field of medicine.
In 1851, after completing graduate studies at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, Blackwell returned to the United States. Barred from practicing in city hospitals, she opened a small dispensary in the tenement district of New York City. In 1857, she and two other recent medical school graduates opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, a hospital staffed entirely by women.
- Lean more about the life of Elizabeth Blackwell and other pioneers in Science, Medicine, Exploration, and Invention and Women's History in the collection Words and Deeds in American History, a selection of approximately ninety representative documents from the Manuscripts Division.
- Don't miss Petticoat Surgeon, the autobiography of physician Bertha Van Hoosen, featured in Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910. Van Hoosen's book chronicles her early studies and career in medicine, as well as her extensive travels and encounters with physicians in Europe and Asia. Also highlighted are medical issues debated at the turn of the century such as care for unwed mothers, anesthesia for childbirth, and discrimination against women doctors.
- See the Learning Page feature Women Pioneers in American Memory which includes pages on Suffrage and on The Struggle for Equality.
- See Today in History features on the Woman Suffrage Movement which built on the strides taken by women like Elizabeth Blackwell:
- the 1854 Ohio Woman's Rights Convention;
- the 1869 decision by the Wyoming Territory to grant women the right to vote;
- the 1873 legal argument by Carrie Burnham;
- the 1885 birth of Alice Paul;
- the 1917 arrest of suffragists in front of the White House.
