Women's rights- Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell- Women's rights
Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Bristol, England on February 3, 1821. She was the third of nine children. Blackwell’s father believed girls should get the same education as boys so he had the servants tutor them. While growing up Blackwell lost six of her sister and two of her brothers. After a fire destroyed her father’s business, they moved to New York City. Her family was Quakers and anti-slavery to so they moved to Ohio when her dad was offered a refinery that slaves would not have to be the ones to pick the sugar cane. Three months later he died.
After father died she took a teaching job to raise money for medical school and she hated so bad that she quit. She resided in a physician’s household, using her time there to study from the family’s medical Library. She became a part in the Anti-slavery act. She read medicine in the home of Dr. John Dickson, later read with her brother Dr. Samuel Henry Dickson in South Carolina.
She was accepted to Geneva College by Student Vote. She was treated rudely by the staff and the students. January 11, 1849, she became the first woman in America to earn a medical degree. January 23 1834 she graduated first in her class. She went to Paris to practice medicine and got a severe eye infection and lost her eye and it was replaced with a glass eye.
Later with her sister Emily and Dr. Marie Zakrsewska they founded an infirmary, named the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. During the American Civil War, she trained nurses and sent them to the Union Army.
In 1857, Blackwell returned to England where she attended Bedford College for Women for one year. In 1858, under a clause in the 1858 Medical Act that recognized doctors with foreign degrees practicing in Britain before 1858, she was able to become the first woman to have her name entered on the General Medical Council's medical register.
1869, she left her sister Emily in charge of the college and returned to England. There, with Florence Nightingale, she opened the Women's Medical College. Blackwell taught at London School of Medicine for Women, which she had co-founded, and accepted a chair in gynecology. She retired a year later.
In 1856, she adopted Katherine "Kitty" Barry, an orphan of Irish origin, who was her companion for the rest of her life. In 1907 Blackwell was injured in a fall from which she never fully recovered. She died on May 31st 1910 at her home in Hastings in Sussex after a stroke.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/blackwellelizabeth/a/eliz_blackwell.htm
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