Elizabeth blackwell book report

Excerpt
The Doctors Blackwell

The world knows Elizabeth Blackwell as the first woman in America to receive a medical degree, in 1849. Her sister Emily joined her in that distinction in 1854. Their achievements, including the foundation of the first hospital run by and for women, are enshrined in American history.

But in 1845, before Elizabeth became an icon, she was a bored and frustrated 24-year-old, teaching to help support her mother and eight siblings in Cincinnati. It was at this stalled moment that a terminally ill friend planted the seed of an idea. "If I could have been treated by a lady doctor," the woman confided, "my worst sufferings would have been spared me."

Elizabeth scoffed. Why would a young woman enthralled by literature and philosophy suddenly apply her considerable ambition to what was, essentially, still a trade—and not even a lucrative one? Not to mention there was no such thing as a female physician, at least in any honorable sense. Women who claimed that...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Which sister, Elizabeth or Emily, resonated more strongly with you? Why?
2. None of the five Blackwell sisters married, while their brothers chose strikingly independent women as partners. Why do you think this was?
3. What were the origins of Elizabeth's interest in the newborn field of public health?
4. How did Emily's ideas about the role of a female physician diverge from Elizabeth's?
5. How did the Blackwell sisters feel about women's rights, or other women in general?
6. Nineteenth-century medicine looked very different from modern practice, but like today the pace of innovation was rapid. What did you find most startling about the Blackwells' medical training—and which of our techniques will seem quaint or barbaric in the future?
7. The Blackwells ...

The first woman in America to receive a medical degree, Elizabeth Blackwell championed the participation of women in the medical profession and ultimately opened her own medical college for women.

Born near Bristol, England on February 3, 1821, Blackwell was the third of nine children of Hannah Lane and Samuel Blackwell, a sugar refiner, Quaker, and anti-slavery activist. Blackwell’s famous relatives included brother Henry, a well-known abolitionist and women’s suffrage supporter who married women’s rights activist Lucy Stone; Emily Blackwell, who followed her sister into medicine; and sister-in-law Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first ordained female minister in a mainstream Protestant denomination.

In 1832, the Blackwell family moved to America, settling in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1838, Samuel Blackwell died, leaving the family penniless during a national financial crisis. Elizabeth, her mother, and two older sisters worked in the predominantly female profession of teaching.

Blackwell was inspired to pursue medicine by a dying friend who said her ordeal would have been better had she had a female physician. Most male physicians trained as apprentices to experienced doctors; there were few medical colleges and none that accepted women, though a few women also apprenticed and became unlicensed physicians.

While teaching, Blackwell boarded with the families of two southern physicians who mentored her. In 1847, she returned to Philadelphia, hoping that Quaker friends could assist her entrance into medical school. Rejected everywhere she applied, she was ultimately admitted to Geneva College in rural New York, however, her acceptance letter was intended as a practical joke.

Blackwell faced discrimination and obstacles in college: professors forced her to sit separately at lectures and often excluded her from labs; local townspeople shunned her as a “bad” woman for defying her gender role. Blackwell eventually earned the respect of professors and classmates,

Women pulled away their skirts when she passed!

Crowds gathered in the streets to stare at her, whistled, jeered, insulted her.

Small boys hung by their finger tips from the window sills to catch a glimpse of this amazing creature—a woman who dared to study medicine in a classroom crowded with men, in this year of 1847.

This woman was Elizabeth Blackwell, pioneer not only of medicine as a career for women, but innovator as well of some of the outstanding medical reforms of her day. Her admission to the small New York medical school which finally accepted her was the result of a joke, an exuberant prank played on the faculty by a mischievous student body.

Of course, no one actually believed she would come. When she did, the newspapers were agog. Reporters flocked to the classroom. Visitors crowded the lectures. Her conduct, her appearance, the impression she made on those around her were reported with all the interest given to some notorious figure at a great murder trial. Even her phrenob—the shape and bumps of her head—were studied.

In New York, indignant landlords would not rent her an office. Anonymous letters of insult crowded her mail, and twice mobs threatened her life and that of her patients!

This small, well-bred woman with her shy manner and Quaker-like bonnets, was not only the first woman to graduate from a medical college, the first woman to enter an American hospital as an intern, the first woman to be enrolled on the Medical Register of Great Britain, she was also the founder of a great woman's hospital, staffed by women, operated by women, for women and children alone. She founded the first school of nursing in America. She helped to establish the battlefield nursing services of the Civil War. She founded a medical school for women, introducing new subjects and a longer, more thorough, course than that offered at any American College.

She taught health education, hygiene, preventative medicine, in a day when these words we

Elizabeth Blackwell’s life has long figured prominently in the standard inspirational liturgy for little girls. In 1849, Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from an American medical school. She completed rigorous postgraduate training and led a busy professional life. She unlocked the doors of the male medical world and propped them wide open for the rest of us.

Needless to say, this hoary version of events contains some inaccuracies. For one thing, some doors barring women from male-dominated medical spheres are even now not yet open. For another, during much of recorded history uncredentialed women functioned as society’s primary healers. This truth strips any concept of “first doctor” of a certain amount of its sheen. And, most problematic of all, Blackwell was a real piece of work. As Janice P. Nimura makes clear in “The Doctors Blackwell,” her impeccably researched and beautifully articulated retelling, Blackwell was neither iconic feminist nor iconic physician, but both less and perhaps more of each than generally advertised.

The story’s arc is familiar enough. The first American female physician was actually not American at all. She emigrated from Britain in 1832, at age 11, with her large family of fervent abolitionists and religious dissenters. Although she spent time in the Midwest and practiced in New York City, Elizabeth always felt most at home in England, and would ultimately head back to retire there. Americans tended to find her stiff and standoffish in an off-putting British kind of a way. She, in turn, had fairly limited affection for those she once termed the “country boobies and boobyesses” of her adopted home.

The early death o