American’s first woman doctor 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 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.
For more information about the brave women who dared practice medicine read The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West. Visit www.chrisenss.com.
