Elizabeth Blackwell Opens a Door into Medical Education

In October 1847, Elizabeth Blackwell received an unexpected admission to Geneva Medical College in western New York. Facing an applicant whose gender unsettled the faculty, the administrators had outsourced the decision to the student body, expecting the all-male class to reject her. Instead, the students voted in favor of her admission, by most accounts as a joke. Blackwell arrived promptly, endured the initial hostility and isolation of both her peers and the local community, and applied herself to her studies. On 23 January 1849, she graduated at the top of her class, becoming the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.

Her path to that degree had been shaped by financial necessity and firm determination rather than early ambition. Born in Bristol, England, in 1821, she moved with her family to the United States in 1832, when she was eleven, after financial setbacks to her father's sugar refining business. Following his death in Cincinnati, Ohio, Blackwell taught school to help support her relatives, though she found the profession unsatisfactory. Her interest in medicine emerged after a dying friend suggested that receiving care from a female physician would have spared her much suffering. Blackwell subsequently read medical texts in private households and studied anatomy in Philadelphia, seeking formal entry into institutions that repeatedly rejected her.