Elizabeth Blackwell received her medical degree from Geneva Medical College in upstate New York, becoming the first woman in America to do so. Rejected by more than a dozen schools before Geneva's students voted (partly as a joke) to admit her, she went on to found a hospital run by and for women, opening the medical profession to generations of female physicians.
Elizabeth Blackwell's path to that Geneva, New York, commencement stage was almost absurdly improbable. After every medical school she approached refused her outright, Geneva Medical College put the decision to its all-male student body, assuming they would reject the novelty of a female applicant as a prank. Instead, the students voted unanimously to admit her, treating it as a lark — and Blackwell, undeterred by the condescension, enrolled dead serious.
She faced professors who barred her from certain demonstrations deemed too indelicate for a woman and classmates who alternated between hostility and awe. She graduated first in her class.
Blackwell's diploma opened no easy doors; American hospitals largely refused to employ her, so she trained further in Europe before returning to found the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, staffed entirely by female physicians. Her sister Emily and protégée Marie Zakrzewska followed her into medicine, and Blackwell spent the rest of her life advocating for women's medical education, proving that the 1849 vote had been no joke at all.
Key people: Elizabeth Blackwell