Career

Soon after graduation, Elizabeth left for England and Paris, hoping to supplement her Geneva education with study at the great hospitals of Europe. Though told that she would be welcomed at the teaching hospitals of Paris, the only opportunity she was offered was at the lying-in hospital, La maternité. There she found that her medical training gave her no status above that of the uneducated French village girls who were training to become midwives. Nevertheless, she considered the training in women's and children's diseases, as well as midwifery, to be excellent. She next studied for several months study at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where she was welcomed by the faculty -- except the Professor of Midwifery, who told her that "his neglecting to give me aid, was owning to no disrespect to me as a lady, but to his condemnation of my object!"

Delaunay, Paul. La maternite de Paris Paris: Jules Rousset, 1909 National Library of Medicine

St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London.

Elizabeth returned to the United States in 1851 and settled in New York City, where she hoped to establish a practice. However, patients were slow in coming and she described "a blank wall of social and professional antagonism." Her career instead took the direction it was to have for the rest of her life: the promotion of hygiene and preventive medicine among both lay persons and professionals and the promotion of medical education and opportunities for women physicians.

New York Tribune, Sept. 12, 1851 Courtesy Library of Congress

First presented as a series of lectures in New York in 1852, Lectures on the Laws of Life argues the need for physical education and exercise for the proper physical and moral development of children. Elizabeth Blackwell. Lectures on the Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1871 National Library of Medicine

Elizabeth and Emilie Blackwell. Address on the Medical Education of Women. New York: Baptist & Taylor, 1864 National Library of Medicine

Elizabeth Blackwell. Medicine as a Profession for Women. New York: trustees of the New York Infirmary for Women, 1860. National Library of Medicine

Soon after her return to the U.S., Elizabeth opened a free dispensary to provide out-patient treatment to poor women and children, but it was open only a few hours a week and its services were limited. In 1857, she closed the dispensary and opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, a full-scale hospital with beds for medical and surgical patients. It's purpose was not only to serve the poor, but also to provide positions for women physicians and a training facility for female medical and nursing students. The medical staff at first consisted of Elizabeth and two of her protégées, her sister Emily and Marie Zakrzewska. This institution still exists as the New York University Downtown Hospital.

Fourteenth Annual Report of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. For the Year 1867 New York: Edward O. Jenkins, 1868 National Library of Medicine

Elizabeth believed that women should receive their medical education alongside men in the established medical schools. She was not sympathetic to the women's medical schools that had opened in Boston, Philadelphia and New York in the 1850s. However, since the women trained in her Infirmary were not able to gain admission to the male medical colleges, she was persuaded to establish her own women's medical college.

The Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. [Announcement, 1868-69] New York, 1868 National Library of Medicine

"The anatomy lecture room at the Woman's Medical College of New York Infirmary." Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, April 16, 1870. Library of Congress

The Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary opened its doors in 1868, with fifteen students and a faculty of nine, including Elizabeth, as Professor of Hygiene, and her younger sister Emily as Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women. The year after the College's opening, Elizabeth left for England, leaving the College under Emily's directorship.

Elizabeth Blackwell, late in life National Library of Medicine

She had always planned to return to England to make her career, and in 1869 she left New York to spend the remaining 40 years of her life in Great Britain.

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