This week, the Medical Heritage Library is celebrating the life of Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and the first woman on the UK Medical Register. Elizabeth, born February 3, 1821, in Bristol, England, was the third child of Hannah (Lane) Blackwell (1792–1870) and Samuel Blackwell (1790–1838)’s nine children. Elizabeth attended Geneva Medical College from 1847 to 1849, and in 1853, she established a small dispensary in New York City with her sister, Emily (the third woman to receive a medical degree in the United States), and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska (1829-1902); the dispensary expanded in 1857 to become the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. As an adjunct to the infirmary, Elizabeth and Emily founded the Women’s Medical College in New York in 1868. In the years following the Civil War, Elizabeth resettled in England. There, with physician and feminist Sophia Jex-Blake (1840-1912), she founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. Like her sisters, Elizabeth Blackwell never married.
Elizabeth was one many remarkable Blackwell family members, who collectively advocated for abolition, women’s rights and women’s suffrage, public health measures, and prohibition. The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, houses the papers of the Blackwell family and has digitized the entire collection, including an extensive number of photographs.
Elizabeth’s mark on medicine is visible — and accessible — in the Medical Heritage Library, which includes the full text of Blackwell’s Medicine as a Profession for Women (1860), the address, The influence of women in the profession of medicine (1890), and her two-volume work, Essays in Medical Sociology I (1902) and II (1902), among others.