The World Health Organisation estimates there to be around
10-15 million practising doctors in the world; around 4-6 million of those
being female. The figure is rapidly increasing, with estimates showing that
females will soon outnumber male doctors towards 2017; however, this has not
always been the case. Women have only been able to qualify as certified
physicians as of the First World War, when doctors were desperately needed to
take care of injured soldiers regardless of their gender, and one of the most
influential women in this race for equality was Elizabeth Blackwell.
Born in Bristol in February 1821, Blackwell moved to the
United States as a young girl with her family, where she first worked as a
teacher, alongside her mother and two sisters. She had her so-called ‘eureka
moment’ in her late-twenties, when Blackwell’s close friends was diagnosed with
a terminal illness, and found it embarrassing to have male doctor. Compelled by
a strong sense of compassion and determination, Blackwell then decided that she
was going to peruse a career in medicine, although it was virtually impossible
to achieve this feat. Her family told her it was a good idea, but unrealistic;
it was too expensive, and such education was not available to women- yet
Blackwell was strongly attracted to this challenge, and so applied to all the
medical schools in New York and Philadelphia.
In 1847, she was then accepted into the Geneva Medical
College after the male staff voted to let her join the university as a joke. As
a determined young woman in an all-male medical school she was often humiliated
by students, professors and patients alike; yet, she took this in her stride
and graduated at the top of her class in 1849, after having written her thesis
on Typhus fever.
She then worked as a physician in London and Paris, and her
dreams of becoming a surgeon were shattered in 1851 when she contracted purulent opthalmia from a patient,
leaving her blind in one eye.
However, after having encouraged many more women
to become doctors, she opened a small dispensary in a rented room in New York,
and this then further progressed into The
New York Infirmary for Women and Children, which opened in 1857, with help
from fellow female doctors Marie Zakrzewska and Emily Blackwell. This
institution and its medical school for women (which opened 1867) provided
training and experience for women doctors and medical care for the poor, and is
estimated to have helped at least 100,000 civilians in New York while it ran,
and one of the alumni of the college (Sophia Jex-Blake) then returned to England and set up the first
medical school especially for women in the UK.
In addition to this, at the outbreak of the American
Civil War in 1861, she helped organize the Woman’s Central Association of
Relief and the U.S. Sanitary Commission alongside President Abraham
Lincoln, training nurses to help take care of injured soldiers in the war.
After returning to England to continue her medical career in women’s medicine, she
became the first woman to have her name placed on the British
medical register, and published many papers and books, with some examples
being: The Religion of Health (1871),
Essays in Medical Sociology (1902)
and most famously her autobiography- Pioneer
Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895), in which she
elaborately records her struggles and triumphs which she went through in being
one of the first officially recognized female doctors in the world.
Blackwell showed the scientific world that women were just
as capable of becoming eminent physicians as men, and in turn inspired a huge
revolution of women in medicine and other scientific careers. It was from her
inspiration and perseverance that we owe many female-specialized hospitals and
health centres today, and in the words of the heroine herself: “If society will
not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodelled”.
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