‘Doctors Blackwell’ Tells The Story Of 2 Pioneering Sisters Who Changed Medicine

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19 Янв 2021, 22:36

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An illustration shows medical student Elizabeth Blackwell at Geneva Medical College (later Hobart College) in upstate New York, as she eyes a note dropped onto her arm by a male student, during a lecture in the college’s operating room.

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The medical school that she ended up in was in Geneva, N.Y., right near Seneca Falls, in the Finger Lakes. She was right there. And yet she really looked sideways at those women, who really wanted to recruit her to their side. She was doing something very visible and very stunning, and they really wanted her to be part of their movement. She laughed in a way — or at least scorned what they were trying to invite her to do. I think she called the Seneca Falls conference «the Seneca Falls absurdity.» She really believed that there was different work to do first. And she chose medicine because it was an unusually graphic way to prove this idea that women could do what they wanted to do by virtue of toil and talent, not anything to do with their sex.

On how it was for Emily Blackwell, following in her sister’s footsteps

Geneva College itself, having given Elizabeth a degree at the top of the class, politely but firmly said, Emily, we are not interested in having you here as a student. We’ve had enough with women medical students. The issue was that just at the time that Elizabeth was receiving her medical degree, women’s medical colleges were beginning to open, because there were more than just these two women who were interested in receiving medical degrees.

But the world was so horrified at the idea of men and women studying medicine together that in Philadelphia and in Boston, women’s medical colleges had opened. So if you were a woman who wanted to pursue medicine, that was the obvious thing to do. It was much easier for the male medical colleges to reject you because they could say, why do you need to come here? Go there. That’s for you.

Emily, though, and Elizabeth, did not esteem these women’s medical colleges highly at all. They just concluded that any women’s medical college is going to be, by definition, inferior, mediocre — that a truly impressive degree would only be earned from a men’s medical college.

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Janice Nimura’s essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. She is also the author of Daughters of the Samurai.

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Janice Nimura’s essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. She is also the author of Daughters of the Samurai.

Lucy Schaeffer Photography/WW Norton

So Emily was not going to be bested by her sister and take a degree from a women’s medical college. So she struggled and received, I would say, more rejections than Elizabeth, because the Blackwell name was now a thing. But she insisted and eventually found her way to a place at Rush Medical College in Chicago, which was wonderful. And she had a wonderful year there. And she found a wonderful patron among the faculty and was doing great until he decided to take a sabbatical. And the trustees of Rush said, could you please not come back for the second term? Thanks.

And so she was left high and dry and — being just as determined as Elizabeth — managed to get herself to a place at Cleveland Medical College, which is now Case Western, to finish her second term and receive her diploma. She was just as much of a force.

On Emily’s legacy more in the practice and Elizabeth more as a writer about public health

They died within months of each other in 1910. There was a huge gathering at the New York Academy of Medicine to honor their lives, and the speakers honored both of them, of course — honored Elizabeth’s pioneering achievement.

But none of the speakers had known Elizabeth in the last 40 years because she’d been gone [in England], and all of them had a deeper professional connection to Emily as this major figure in the New York medical scene. And, so, when you read the eulogies that happened that day, the eulogies for Elizabeth were rather more formal, talking about her as if she was sort of an idea more than a person. But the eulogies for Emily were really warm and and deeply respectful and admiring.

Sam Briger and Kayla Lattimore produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin adapted it for the Web.