A Determined Lady

In 1850, an anonymous letter from San Francisco arrived at a newspaper office in New York. It read, “A smart woman can do very well in this country – true there are not many comforts and one must work all the time and work hard but…it is the only country that I ever was in where a woman received anything like a just compensation for work.” One of the ladies I had the privilege of writing about a few years ago who lived out that claim was Elizabeth Blackwell. Blackwell was America’s first woman doctor. She was admitted to New York’s Geneva College in 1847 as a joke, and was expected to flunk out within months. Nevertheless, Blackwell prevailed and triumphed over taunts and bias while at medical school to earn her degree two years later. While in her last year of medical training, she was cleaning the infected eye of an infant when she accidentally splattered a drop of water into her own eye. Six months later she had the eye taken out and had it replaced with a glass eye. Afterward, American hospitals refused to hire her. She then borrowed a few thousand dollars to open a clinic in New York City, which she called the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. She charged patients only four dollars a week, if they had it, for full treatment that might cost at least two thousand dollars a day at the going rate. During the Civil War she set up an organization to train nurses. Women’s Central Association of Relief, which later became the United States Sanitary Commission. In 1910 at age eighty-nine she died after a fall from which she never fully recovered. A truly dedicated individual can do such remarkable things.