Elizabeth Blackwell's medical degree

Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, in 1821 and moved with her family to the United States at 11; her father made sure his daughters were well educated. When she set out to study medicine she applied to more than a dozen schools and was turned down by several before Geneva Medical College in upstate New York accepted her in October 1847.

Her admission began as a prank. The faculty, assuming the all-male student body would never agree, let the students vote on it, and they voted yes as a joke. Once enrolled, she was at first kept out of surgical demonstrations and had to insist on being treated as a student like any other. She graduated in 1849 to wide public interest.

The further training she wanted was not yet available in the United States, so she spent two years in clinics in London and Paris. At La Maternité in Paris, where she studied midwifery, she caught purulent ophthalmia from a young patient and lost her left eye, which ended her plan to become a surgeon.

Women who qualified in medicine were being refused hospital internships, so Blackwell made a hospital of her own. With her younger sister, Dr. Emily Blackwell, and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, she opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children at 64 Bleecker Street in 1857. It treated poor patients and trained women physicians, and a medical college for women was added in 1867. She argued the case in print in Medicine as a Profession for Women (1860) and Address on the Medical Education of Women (1864).

In 1895 she published an account of her career, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women. She died in Hastings, England, in 1910.