Lone Woman: The Story Of Elizabeth Blackwell, The First Woman Doctor.

Plot

The "double standard" was all too real in mid-nineteenth-century America. It described the common lot of women--in the professions, in the economic sphere, in politics, and in the home. Yet there were always a few determined women who refused to accept the status quo. One was Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to receive a medical degree. Born into a large family in England in 1821, Blackwell was brought to the United States as a child. Throughout her life she was surrounded by a circle of family and friends which held, in its numbers, some of the most dynamic personalities of the times: Florence Nightingale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horace Greeley, Lady Noel Byron, and Elizabeth's own famous brother, Henry Brown Blackwell, an influential abolitionist, and his wife, Lucy Stone, a noted suffragette. Although Dr. Blackwell worked as a general practitioner in New York City, she is best remembered today, with her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell, as the founder of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. The Infirmary was later expanded to include a women's college for training doctors, and this important medical unit still stands today, a modern, flourishing memorial to the Blackwell sisters and to the unflagging conviction which made their dream a reality. This book is a fascinating and sympathetic profile--from the years of desperate struggle that won Blackwell her coveted degree from the Geneva Medical College, through untold disappointments in the hospitals of Paris, London, and New York, and through the tragedy which killed her hopes of becoming a surgeon. Despite the hardships she encountered, Dr. Blackwell became professor of gynecology at the London School of Medicine for Women and was the author of numerous books and papers on public health and personal hygiene. This is a biography of great charm about an unusual woman and the crucial times in which she lived. Many of the women who came to the fore in the various phases of the nineteenth-century feminist ferment were overbearing and eccentric. But Elizabeth Blackwell pursued her goals not for the satisfaction of shattering social barriers nor to demonstrate her intellectual equality with men, but because she believed firmly that female doctors could be in a unique position to serve the needs of female patients, and labored throughout her life to bring other women into the medical profession.--Adapted from dust jacket.