She became only the third woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. Instead, students found the possibility amusing and voted unanimously to let Elizabeth enroll.Įmily Blackwell, five years younger than Elizabeth, followed her sister’s career path after navigating the same medical-school admissions roadblocks. Faculty at Geneva opted to let their students decide whether to admit her, assuming that the young men would reject the idea of a woman classmate. Nimura fleshes out this oft-cited description of Blackwell’s struggle to get into med school with a story about how the acceptance nearly didn’t happen. One part of the Blackwell story that’s well established is that Elizabeth was rejected from twenty-nine medical schools before she was accepted, in 1847, to Geneva Medical College in upstate New York (Columbia did not admit its first female medical students until seventy years later). She never seemed particularly interested in curing disease or easing people’s suffering. This was a strange choice for a woman who wrote, “The very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust.” Nimura points out that becoming a physician was mainly a means to an end for Elizabeth - a way to make a name for herself and demonstrate that women could be the intellectual equals of men. Born in 1821 and raised in a family of nine children by abolitionist parents, Elizabeth Blackwell was determined to attend medical school.
The Blackwell sisters were extraordinary for different but no less compelling reasons. Like The Doctors Blackwell, her first book, Daughters of the Samurai, was a joint biography of women who were extraordinary for their time - in that case, young Japanese girls who were sent to the United States in the late 1800s to learn Western culture and bring that knowledge back to their home country. Nimura, who has a master’s in East Asian studies from Columbia, is known for her skill at archival treasure-hunting. But trading hagiography for historical fact is always a worthwhile enterprise, and Nimura’s impressively researched book, which makes liberal use of the subjects’ letters and journals, renders these nineteenth-century groundbreakers as complex, contradictory human beings.
Nimura ’01GSAS, Elizabeth Blackwell - the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States - and her younger sister Emily, also a physician, have their feminist legacies slightly tarnished. In The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women - and Women to Medicine, a new biography by Janice P. History is filled with pioneering figures who, on closer inspection, are found to be seriously flawed.
Elizabeth Blackwell (National Library of Medicine) and Emily Blackwell (New York Academy of Medicine).
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