Emily Blackwell

• Emily Blackwell
• Born: October 8, 1826
• Died: September 7, 1910

Physicians, opened the doors of professional medicine to women. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a regular American medical school, was born in Counter-slip, near Bristol, England. She was the third of five daughters and nine surviving children born to Samuel Blackwell and Hannah (Lane) Black-well. Together, she and her siblings comprised a remarkable group: she and Emily became doctors; her eldest sister, Anna, was a newspaper correspondent; a younger sister, Ellen, was a writer and artist; two younger brothers, Samuel and Henry, were active reformers married respectively to minister and suffragist Antoinette Brown and abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone.

Elizabeth Blackwell’s mother came from a wealthy merchant family and brought culture into the family. But it was her father, an independent Congregationalist with liberal political and social views, who had the major influence on her childhood. Believing that all his children should have the opportunity to reach their fullest intellectual potential, he provided his daughter with an early education at home that encouraged her intellectual curiosity and free expression. Seeking better financial opportunities for his sugar business, in 1832 he took his family to New York, where he enrolled Elizabeth in “an excellent school” and encouraged her involvement, along with the rest of the family, in the abolition movement. In 1838, with his sugar business failing in New York, Samuel Blackwell moved his family to Cincinnati, hoping again for better economic prospects. Three months later (August 6, 1838) he died, leaving his family in debt.

To support themselves, the Blackwells opened a school, the Cincinnati English and French Academy for Young Ladies. Elizabeth Blackwell spent the next several years of her life teaching, first in her family-run school, then privately in Cincinnati, and finally for a year in the small, remote town of Henderson, Kentucky. From the beginning, she found teaching to be intellectually unrewarding, but continued to teach because of economic necessity. It was during this period that she began to explore new intellectual ideas on her own. She became interested in transcendentalism through her contact with William Henry Channing, and in women’s rights, particularly the idea of education for women.

When she returned from Kentucky, she began to confront seriously the question of her future, hoping to find an alternative to teaching. It was a close friend, dying of a gynecological disorder, who first suggested medicine to her. Explaining that her worst sufferings would have been spared her if she “could have been treated by a lady doctor,” the friend urged Blackwell to study medicine.

Though initially repelled by the idea, Elizabeth Blackwell was motivated to pursue it by her disgust with female abortionists like the notorious Madame Restell of New York City, who defiled the title of “female physician,” and by her personal struggle over the question of marriage. Her involvement with a young man at this time of her life forced her to choose between marriage and career, for a woman in her day could not expect to have both. Unwilling to become economically dependent on a man for the rest of her life, and uncomfortable with the “disturbing influence exercised by the other sex,” she gave up the option of marriage. Though this was a decision that distinguished her from the majority of women of her day, it was not an unusual choice within the context of her family, for all of her sisters remained single as well.

Having chosen to forgo the traditional avenue of marriage, she threw herself passionately into the pursuit of a medical career. To raise the money for her education she returned to teaching. She taught music for two years in North and South Carolina, all the while keeping up her medical studies by reading medical texts and studying, first with Dr. John Dickson in North Carolina, and then with his brother, Dr. Samuel Dickson, in South Carolina.

Returning North in 1847, she went to Philadelphia to pursue her opportunities for medical training. Several liberal Quaker physicians, such as Joseph Warrington and William Elder, in whose home Blackwell stayed while in Philadelphia, supported her goals and tried, though unsuccessfully, to help her. Undaunted by rejections from medical schools in New York City and Philadelphia, and unwilling to follow the suggestion of some that she study in Europe disguised as a man, she applied to twelve of the “most promising” smaller medical schools scattered throughout the North. In October 1847 Geneva Medical College in upstate New York accepted her. (Geneva College was later renamed Hobart College.) This acceptance did not reflect a commitment to standards of equality for women with men. Rather, the faculty, unwilling to take responsibility for rejecting so qualified a candidate, left the decision to the students, who, intrigued by the novelty of a woman in their class, voted unanimously to accept her.

Despite the cynicism surrounding her acceptance, Blackwell delighted in her studies. Her seriousness of purpose ultimately won her the respect of most of her classmates and the support and admiration of her anatomy professor, Dr. James Webster. Yet she felt the prevailing prejudice against a woman in medicine. Women refused to associate with her and the townspeople of Geneva thought her a “bad woman” or “insane.” Occasionally she endured ridicule from a few of her classmates as well, and even Dr. Webster, her staunch supporter, initially intended to exclude her from lectures on the reproductive system, a plan from which she dissuaded him.

At the end of her first term, she returned to Philadelphia, where she was admitted to the wards of Philadelphia Hospital of Blockley Almshouse. This first opportunity for clinical experience had a long-range influence on her in two significant ways. The Irish immigrant patients suffering from typhus provided her with a topic for her graduate thesis. In that thesis, “Ship Fever: An Inaugural Thesis,” published in the Buffalo Medical Journal and Monthly Review in 1849, she first articulated what later became the cornerstone of her medical practice and philosophy: the importance of hygiene and sanitation. At the same time, the women she encountered in the syphilis ward opened her eyes to women’s sexual vulnerability and to the role she felt women must play in emphasizing the moral dimension of sex. This was a theme she later developed in her essay “The Human Element in Sex” (1884).

She returned to Geneva for her second term, and on January 23, 1849, she received her medical degree, thereby becoming the first woman to graduate from a regular American medical school. After graduation, she went to Europe for clinical experience and entered La Maternité, the major lying-in hospital in Paris. Unfortunately, she contracted ophthalmia there while treating the infected eyes of a newborn baby. The infection left her blind in one eye and destroyed her hopes of a surgical career. Yet her year of recuperation in London helped forward her career, for she met women of influential social standing, such as Florence Nightingale, Lady Noel Byron, and Barbara Leigh Smith, as well as such highly respected medical men as Dr. James Paget, with whom she studied for a while at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.

In the summer of 1851, Blackwell returned to New York to establish her medical career. But again prejudice against women doctors stood in her way. The hostility of male colleagues, the closed doors of dispensaries and hospitals, and the unwillingness of landlords to rent office space to a “female physician” separated her from the mainstream of the medical profession. Yet in keeping with her persistent and resourceful character, she took steps to remedy this professional and social isolation. She purchased a house, and while she waited for patients to call on her, she began a series of lectures to women that called on them to tame the licentious, animal passions of men and that emphasized the importance of physical exercise for young women.

With these lectures, later published in 1852 as The Laws of Life with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls, Elizabeth Blackwell emerged as an outspoken advocate of moral reform and women’s rights. Moreover, they attracted the attention of influential Quaker women who subsequently helped her launch her medical career. The following year she opened a small dispensary to serve poor women. It was also at this time in her life that she began to build a network of support and female colleagueship. In 1854 she adopted a seven-year-old orphan, Katherine (Kitty) Barry, who became not only her child but her lifelong friend, servant, and companion. By 1856 she had living and working with her both her sister Emily and Marie Zakrzewska, the German-born midwife whom she had helped gain admission to Western Reserve Medical College.

With this nucleus of support and with additional encouragement from liberal male reformers including William Henry Beecher and Horace Greeley, Elizabeth Blackwell opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857. The hospital was unusual for its day because its directors were women and its physicians—Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and Marie Zakrzewska—were women. As an all female hospital, the New York Infirmary met the special needs of women, providing female patients with medical attention from doctors of their own sex and female physicians with a place to train and work.

In 1858 Elizabeth Blackwell left the hospital in the hands of her sister and Zakrzewska and went to England for a year to help advance the cause of women in medicine there. In a series of lectures on the subject of women in medicine, she returned to the theme of hygiene and argued that family health depended on women’s thorough knowledge of physiology. Her lectures had a particularly strong influence on Elizabeth Garrett, who, with Blackwell’s help, went on to become a pioneer woman doctor in England. Also during her stay in England, she became the first officially recognized female physician in Great Britain when her name was listed on the Medical Register of the United Kingdom.

In the summer of 1859, she returned to New York City and began plans to open a women’s medical college. The outbreak of the Civil War temporarily delayed her plans, but by 1863 she was actively involved in establishing a medical school equal to the best that was available to men. The Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, which opened in 1868, had the highest of professional standards: entrance examinations, a three-year graded curriculum, and ample time for clinical experience. There was also an emphasis on hygiene.

The desire to keep up with the best of the male medical profession, even at the expense of feminism, shaped the history of the school. In the beginning, the Blackwells were hesitant to accept graduates from what they deemed to be the inferior women’s medical colleges in Philadelphia and Boston. And in 1859, after Cornell University Medical School had opened its doors to women, the college, then headed by Emily Blackwell, was closed. Recognizing that Cornell would never accept the large numbers of women the Woman’s Medical College had, Emily Blackwell felt that her decision was nevertheless consistent with the professional values and standards she and her sister shared from the school’s inception—that a respected male medical school such as Cornell was always the preferable professional choice for women.

In 1869, with the hospital and medical school functioning smoothly, Elizabeth Blackwell left them in the hands of her sister and returned to England to make her permanent home there. In the first few years after her return, she occupied herself in a number of ways, practicing medicine, founding the National Health Society (1871) to promote her interest in hygiene, helping other women doctors (especially Elizabeth Garrett and Sophia Jex-Blake), and teaching gynecology. Poor health put an end to her activity, and in 1876 she moved with Kitty Barry to a seaside house in Hastings, where she spent the last three decades of her life.

It was during these later years that Elizabeth Blackwell turned her attention from medicine and returned to her early concerns with moral reform. In a series of lectures and essays, including Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children (1878) and The Human Element in Sex (1886), she rejected the Victorian code of silence on sexuality and argued against prostitution, male licentiousness, and the double standard.

While her emphasis on sexual reform, hygiene, and women’s rights placed her in the forefront of social and medical thought, she was at the same time regressive in her resistance to the medical innovations of vaccination and vivisection. Nevertheless, she stood out strongly as a medical and social reformer and as a champion of women in medicine. She died at the age of eighty-nine, three years after a fall from which she never completely recovered, and was buried in Argyllshire, Scotland, where she had spent her final summers.

Whereas Elizabeth Blackwell was the pioneer who forged the path for women in medicine, it was her younger sister Emily who carried on the work she had begun. Emily Blackwell, born in Bristol, England, was the sixth of the nine children—the fourth of the five daughters. She was five when her father moved the family to New York in search of better economic opportunities for his sugar business, and she was eleven when he died in 1838, after moving the family to Cincinnati. Though her father did not influence her life in the strong way he had shaped her sister’s, Emily Blackwell was imbued with his liberal ideas through other members of her family.

It was Elizabeth who had the greatest influence on her life. Like her sister, Emily Blackwell chose not to marry (“A marriage is always unpleasant to me,” she wrote in her journal in 1850), adopted a young girl to be her daughter, and decided to become a doctor. Following closely in her sister’s path, she became a teacher to raise the money for her medical training, teaching first in Henderson, Kentucky, as her sister had, and then in Cincinnati. And, like Elizabeth, she found teaching a “most detestable occupation” and eagerly anticipated acceptance into medical school, which would open to her a “freer nobler sphere.”

Rejections from eleven medical schools, including Geneva College, only strengthened her resolve which was finally rewarded when Rush Medical College in Chicago accepted her in 1852. But the school, censured for its indiscretion by the State Medical Society, did not permit her to return for her second year, and after a summer in New York, during which she helped her sister in the dispensary, she took her second year at the Medical College of Western Reserve University in Cincinnati, graduating with honors in 1854. Again, like her sister, she went abroad after graduation for clinical experience. In her two years of postgraduate training, she worked first in Edinburgh with the noted Sir James Young Simpson, and then in hospitals and clinics in London, Paris, Berlin, and Dresden.

Emily Blackwell returned to New York City in 1856 to help her sister and Marie Zakrzewska open the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. In 1859, with her sister in England and Zakrzewska settled in Boston, she ran the hospital herself. She proved a most capable manager. Under her charge, the hospital grew rapidly, and after Elizabeth returned from England the sisters moved the hospital to larger quarters in 1860. They worked together for the next eight years, running the hospital and working to open the medical college for women. In 1869, after her sister’s permanent departure for England, she took over both the school and the hospital. She devoted the next thirty years of her life to the medical institutions they had founded, maintaining and raising their high professional standards.

At the age of eighty-three, Emily Blackwell died of enterocolitis, only three months after the death of her sister, whose path she had so often followed. Yet in the last thirty years of her life Emily Blackwell distinguished herself markedly from her sister. Whereas Elizabeth Blackwell was a trailblazer and social reformer, Emily Blackwell was a true practitioner and teacher of medicine. They complemented each other well, and together they pioneered in opening medicine to women and setting women on the pathway of excellence and high professional standards. The New York Infirmary was their legacy.

Among Elizabeth Blackwell’s major published writings are her autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895; reissued in 1914, with a bibliography of her writings); The Human Element in Sex: Being a Medical Enquiry into the Relation of Sexual Physiology to Christian Morality (1886); and Purchase of Women: The Great Economic Blunder (1887). The Blackwell Family Papers, which include correspondence, journals, etc., are in the Library of Congress and the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College. Letters from Elizabeth Blackwell to her friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon are in the Columbia University Library. Annual catalogues of the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary are also useful. Two popularized sources on Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell are I. Ross, Child of Destiny (1944) and E. R. Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). More recent scholarly works include N. Sahli, Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., (1821-1910): A Biography (1974). Other sources are E. P. Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World, chapter four (1957); New York Academy of Medicine, In Memory of Dr. Elizabeth Black-well and Dr. Emily Blackwell (1911); E. Mosher, “Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell,” Woman’s Medical Journal, April 1911; A. S. Daniel, “ ‘A Cautious Experiment’: The History of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary,” Medical Woman’s Journal, May 1939-December 1942. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1929) and Notable American Women (1971).