Elizabeth Blackwell: first U.S. woman to earn an M.D., 1849

Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree when Geneva Medical College in upstate New York awarded her an M.D. on January 23, 1849.

She had applied to every medical school in New York and Philadelphia and to twelve more in the northeast. Geneva’s faculty, expecting a refusal, handed the decision to the all-male students on condition that the vote be unanimous. The students said yes as a prank on their teachers. According to classmate Stephen Smith, they secured unanimity by beating up the one holdout until he gave in.

She took up medicine, she said, after a dying friend told her that her worst suffering would have been spared with a woman physician. In Geneva, doctors’ wives refused to speak to her. She still graduated at the top of her class, and at commencement Dean Charles Lee praised her while making clear she should be no precedent:

“Such cases must ever be too few, to disturb the existing relations of society.”

Geneva closed its doors to women right after her graduation.

Blackwell is often called America’s first woman doctor. She wasn’t. Harriot Kesia Hunt had practised openly in Massachusetts for about 20 years before Harvard let her attend lectures in 1850; she received only an honorary M.D., in 1853. Blackwell’s distinction is narrower: the first U.S. woman to complete a regular course of study and earn the degree.

In Paris in 1849, an infection caught from a young patient destroyed the sight in one eye and ended her plans to be a surgeon. Back in New York, she opened a one-room dispensary in 1853 and, with her sister Emily and Marie Zakrzewska, founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857, later adding a medical college for women.