But before the family even finished unpacking, Samuel began to show symptoms of an illness that had plagued him for years—possibly the same malaria he had contracted in Flushing. Fevers and fainting fits became more frequent, and soon the doctor was visiting several times a day. “He is just the color of an Indian,” Elizabeth wrote. “Aunt M thinks he will never leave his bed.”
As Samuel sank, Elizabeth—the oldest child present—recorded her father’s symptoms in detail: his distressing restlessness, his irregular breathing, his slowing pulse, the doses of brandy and broth and laudanum, the rubbings with mercury ointment and the spongings with muriatic—better known today as hydrochloric—acid. Unsurprisingly, none of these efforts helped. Though it is tempting to discern in this moment the germ of her medical future, it is perhaps more accurate to see it as the first time she found herself in charge. “I had sat all the evening at the head of his bed with his right hand in mine,” she wrote. “As I leant over the sofa weeping, most ardently did I pray that if it was God’s will to take him from us that [He] would give him a peaceful & easy passage to another world.”
Just after ten o’clock on August 7, 1838, Samuel Blackwell died, his distraught wife and stunned children kneeling at his bedside. “I put my hand to his mouth,” wrote Elizabeth, “& never till my dying day shall I forget the dreadful feeling when I found there was no breath.” The grief in her words is clear, but so is the sense of a young woman feeling the dramatic power of her own narrative as it flows from her pen. “He is dead,” she wrote. “Oh that I should live to write it, the support of our house, the kind generous fond indulgent parent is no more.”
The brutal August heat forced a swift burial. The next day Elizabeth and Hannah examined Samuel’s papers. He had left his widow and nine children, newly deposited at the edge of the world, with twenty dollars.
Fatherlessness produced a sequence of inversions within the Blackwell family. The necessity of earning an income shoved mourning aside, and as the Blackwell sons ranged in age from Sam and Henry, fifteen and thirteen, to Howard and George, seven and five, it fell to their oldest sisters to provide it. Less than three weeks after Samuel’s death, the Cincinnati English and French Academy for Young Ladies welcomed its first students. Elizabeth had printed circulars grandly offering a course of study in “Reading, Writing, Sketching and the rudiments of Drawing, Arithmetic, Grammar, Ancient and Modern History, Geography, Natural and Moral Philosophy, Botany, Composition, the French Language and Vocal Music.” Classes met in the Blackwells’ front parlor.
Having missed their father’s funeral, Anna and Marian hurried to Cincinnati just in time for another death. “Aunt Mary exceedingly unwell,” Elizabeth wrote on September 24. A week later she too was gone. “It seemed as if whatever arrived I should never feel again,” wrote Elizabeth, “not one tear did I shed, the dreadful blow we first received seems to have rendered me callous to everything else.” Transatlantic letters arrived from Hannah’s brothers, urging the new widow to bring her children home to England. Surely Hannah was tempted—but it had always been her husband who steered the family’s course, and now her daughters took the helm. Elizabeth scorned her uncles’ implication that their headless family was helpless as well: “They don’t know what we are made of.” But she hated the long hours, the constant flickering between boredom and anxiety, and the exhausting lack of time to herself. “After school I took my work & sat on the roof in a most delightful wind, how I love that high wind blowing up my hair so boisterously,” she wrote. “I always fancy myself on the ocean sailing back to our home.”
Sam, earnest and pedantic, found a job as a courthouse clerk. Henry, as ebullient as his brother was sober, managed to escape for a year of school in St. Louis until he too came home to work in a bank. Emily had the happiest position: too young to work but old enough to study. Though younger than Henry, she was taller—which amused everyone in the family except Henry—and she threatened to top him in scholarship as well. “I have cut all my wisdom teeth,” she crowed to her closest brother, “and you cannot think how wise I have grown.” Life with three opinionated older sisters had taught her to watch and listen; she was already showing scholarly aptitude on a par with Elizabeth’s, paired with a steadiness that her family would come to appreciate.
On Sundays, liberated from labor, the Blackwells refreshed themselves with ideas. Hannah, true to her Dissenting roots, aligned herself with Lyman Beecher, president of Lane Theological Seminary, where he trained young men to win the West for God. Fervent revival meetings were less attractive to Hannah’s more intellectual daughters, but there was no shortage of pulpits in Cincinnati, where church was the most plentiful form of entertainment. To Hannah’s horror—or possibly because of it—Elizabeth announced her intention to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church, the conservative, socially elite American cousin of the Church of England. Its Englishness perhaps fed her nostalgia for Bristol. But within the year she swung to the other extreme, thanks to the arrival of a charismatic young man named William Henry Channing.
Not quite thirty, and with the hooded gaze and dramatic cheekbones of a poet, the Harvard-educated Channing swept into Cincinnati in 1839 as the pastor of the Unitarian Society. Whereas Episcopalians hewed to ornate High Church practices—the Trinity, saints, embroidered vestments, and clouds of incense—Unitarians believed in the oneness of the divine, with an emphasis on reason, a tolerance for doubt, and a capacious attitude toward individual modes of worship. Through Channing, the Blackwells encountered Transcendentalism, which chimed with their own ideas regarding the natural goodness of humans. “I well remember the glowing face with which I found Mr. Channing reading a book just received,” Elizabeth wrote. “ ‘Sit down,’ he cried, ‘and listen to this!’ and forthwith he poured forth extracts from Emerson’s essays.” By 1840—again to their mother’s horror—the three eldest sisters were Unitarians.
It was through Channing as well that the Blackwells first became interested in the utopian visions of the Frenchman Charles Fourier. Fourier had imagined planned communities, or phalanxes, in which work, determined by individual passion, would become pleasure, and women would fill any role for which their skills and interests equipped them. His doctrine of Associationism imagined harmonious cooperation unbound by corrupt social constraints—including marriage. Where other girls of twenty might daydream of husband, children, and household, Elizabeth began to plan her own phalanx.
But these radical ideas, in the context of Cincinnati society, were not respectable, and the Blackwells needed to project enough respectability to persuade Cincinnati’s leading families to send them their daughters. “I’m sorry to say the school is shrunk very much,” reported Sam after only three years of operation. It closed in 1842, but by then Sam and Henry were older, with steady work.
A new chapter was beginning, and with it a second inversion of convention. Samuel Blackwell’s death had taught his daughters that a husband—especially a dreamer like their father—was no guarantee of security. Marian, the least robust of the Blackwell women, would become the family’s Hestia, tending the family hearth and looking after widowed Hannah as she aged, but Anna, Elizabeth, Emily, and eventually even Ellen would seek fulfillment outside the domestic sphere. During their first fatherless years, the Blackwell daughters had provided for the sons. Now Sam and Henry would remain at home, working at uninspiring jobs while supporting, admiringly and sometimes enviously, their sisters’ bolder journeys.
* Polly was Marian’s nickname.
† The family’s nickname for George Washington.
CHAPTER 2
BETWEENITY
At the end of February 1844, Elizabeth, now twenty-three, left her family for the first time and boarded a riverboat, watching with growing dismay as it slid west past Louisville and beyond what she recognized as civilization. “Madam, we have reached Henderson,” a crew member announced at last, pointing out Elizabeth’s new home: “three dirty old frame buildings, a steep bank covered with mud, some ne
groes & dirty white people at the foot.” The town of Henderson, Kentucky—four days down the Ohio River and across the border into slave territory—was in need of a schoolmistress.
Elizabeth was soon installed in the drafty brick house of one of Henderson’s first families, who were perhaps too assiduous in their hospitality. “I who so love a hermit’s life for a good part of the day,” she wrote, “find myself living in public & almost losing my identity.” Upon her arrival, they sat her by the fire to warm herself—and then, to Elizabeth’s horror, “placed a little negro girl before me as a fire screen.”
Her domain was a chilly, dirt-floored schoolhouse and twenty-one girls who regarded their new teacher with some awe. “I give as far as I can learn universal satisfaction,” Elizabeth wrote. “Indeed I believe the people are a little afraid of me, particularly when they see me read German.” She cultivated this imposing aura, as there was nothing worse than socializing with Henderson’s notables or, as she put it, “striving dreadfully to take an interest in their little miserabilities.” Elizabeth didn’t mind her students, but she was mightily bored by the tobacco-stained provinciality of Henderson, untouched by anything approaching Transcendentalism. “Carlyle’s name has never even been distantly echoed here,” she complained to Marian, citing her favorite Scottish satirist. “Emerson is a perfect stranger, & Channing I presume would produce a universal fainting-fit.”
She found comfort in solitary walks by the river, only to find, as the weather warmed, that her preferred destination was known to courting couples as Lover’s Grove. Not that she wasn’t courted herself, she was quick to point out. “I had many offers of an escort thither and as many beaux as I might desire,” she insisted, but she found carving initials and coy verses on the “unfortunate locust trees” unbearable and had no qualms about saying so. “I laughed at them & their sentimental doings & have had no invitation since,” she wrote, defiant. She may have forsworn marriage at seventeen, but as one who hated to be underestimated—or worse, pitied—she continued to assert that the choice had always been hers.
How could she possibly find a soulmate among people who owned human souls? Years of involvement in the antislavery cause had not prepared her for daily life among enslaved people. “To live in the midst of beings, degraded to the utmost in body & mind, drudging on from earliest morning to latest night,” she wrote, “blamed unjustly & without spirit enough to reply . . . with no hope for the future, smelling horridly & as ugly as Satan—to live in their midst, utterly powerless to help them, is to me dreadful.” She was dismayed by her own contradictory feelings—as much as she abhorred the institution of slavery, she found herself more comfortable, or at least less uncomfortable, in the company of Henderson’s slave owners, even as they prided themselves on their own benevolence. “I endeavor in reply to slide in a little truth through the small apertures of their minds,” Elizabeth wrote, but the effort of controlling her disgust took a toll. “I have an intense longing to scream,” she told Marian, “& everybody here speaks in a whisper.”
She lasted six months. But the experience of earning a salary, answerable only to herself, was formative. “I feel independent for the first time in my life,” she wrote.
Just before Elizabeth left for Henderson, Anna set off in the opposite direction, back to New York to teach music at St. Ann’s Hall in Flushing, a luxurious new girls’ school as grand and elegant as her own self-image. She sent ravishing descriptions of her new situation—a becolumned three-story mansion on grounds that included gardens, a riding ring, and an archery range—back to Cincinnati, mentioning in particular her employer, the Reverend John Frederick Schroeder, a prominent Episcopal figure.
Midway through her first term, Anna summoned Emily, now seventeen and struggling to continue her education in Cincinnati. The eminent Dr. Schroeder, Anna reported triumphantly, had enthusiastically seconded Anna’s suggestion that Emily come to St. Ann’s, being himself, according to Anna, “very fond of drawing out the talents of girls of Milly’s age.” Emily consulted Elizabeth in Henderson. Should she continue to teach and help at home or seize this rare chance to study? The Blackwells had moved to a house near the Beechers in suburban Walnut Hills, with more room but also more housework. Lately, Emily confessed to Elizabeth, “I have felt as though caught in a crime, if Marian found me before supper with a book in my hand.”
Elizabeth’s response was immediate. “Go by all means,” she wrote, for the first time expressing her high estimation of her younger sister’s potential. “When you’ve finished your studies, we may perhaps join together in some undertaking, & make the cash come in like a perfect Croton river, what fountains and baths we’ll establish in our domestic city, how we’ll wash away all trouble & annoyance & make all clean and fresh.” The undertaking in question had yet to present itself, but Elizabeth clearly saw Emily as a partner in it, whatever it might be.
And so in the late summer of 1844, just as Elizabeth returned from Henderson, Emily left for New York. Determined not to squander her good fortune, she toiled through compositions and Bible lessons, impressing Dr. Schroeder as a “ ‘crack’ Greek pupil” and losing herself in botanizing rambles around the school. (“Alas!” sighed her dutiful brother Sam, “I can but gasp aspirations after such an Elysium.”) Cheerful and pragmatic, Emily studied “pretty busily but by no means so as to fatigue myself,” she wrote to Elizabeth, “and I adhere constantly and in all things to my favourite proverb, ‘most haste worst speed.’ ” Anna, Emily’s patronizing patron, was gratified. “Her progress is really wonderful,” she reported to the family. “If she continue as at present, she will be a very different person from the young elephant you lost sight of last Fall.”
Elizabeth, upon her escape from hated Henderson, resumed the uninspiring Cincinnati routine that Emily had left behind and began to feel what Anna described as “the manifold uncomfortablenesses of such a state of betweenity.” That Christmas of 1844, short as always on cash but with literary creativity to spare, the Blackwells compiled an anthology of their own writings, to be sent to absent Anna and Emily and read aloud by all on Christmas Day. Henry, the comedian, contributed to this inaugural Annual a caricature of each Blackwell. Volatile, opinionated Anna was “Changeable Earnest”; serious Sam was “Sacred Awe.” Wisecracking, ever-hungry Henry dubbed himself “Voracious Noodle.” Emily, tall and easygoing, at least for a Blackwell, was “Lymphatic Carrot.” And Elizabeth, with her philosophical inclinations and musical abilities, was “Transcendental Nightingale.” “She may perhaps be the Lion of the family,” Henry added, “being a desperate and energetic sort of female.” Everyone recognized Elizabeth’s caged force.
It was at this frustrated moment, as Elizabeth remembered it, that “a lady friend,” stricken with a terminal illness “the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her,” suggested that a woman of Elizabeth’s intellectual capacity should study medicine. “If I could have been treated by a lady doctor,” the friend confided, “my worst sufferings would have been spared me.”
The details of this formative conversation are lost; as an origin story, it is vague and abrupt. Why would a young woman enthralled by literature and philosophy, and painfully aware of her family’s financial instability, suddenly apply her considerable ambition to what was, essentially, still just a trade—and not even a particularly lucrative one?
Elizabeth at first scoffed at the idea. There was no such thing as a female physician, at least in any honorable sense. Women who claimed that title were peddlers of patent elixirs—or worse, of abortion, that “gross perversion and destruction of motherhood.” Even respectable male doctors, armed with little more than purgatives, laudanum, and lancets, tended to do more harm than good—she had seen this at her father’s bedside. And whereas in Europe the title “doctor” might connote a certain level of education and eminence, egalitarian Americans tended to resist such assumptions of privilege—and the prestige of American medical schools did not yet approach
that of European ones. Some patients preferred an experienced lay practitioner to a man with an M.D.
On top of this, the general state of human health had rarely been worse. The explosive growth of cities had accelerated the evils that proliferate whenever too many people occupy too little space: contaminated water, accumulated garbage and manure, and the fleas and rats and lice that were the only beneficiaries of overcrowding. Babies died almost as often as they lived—even with the benefit of education and income, Hannah and Samuel Blackwell had buried at least three. Those lucky enough to survive childhood later succumbed to tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, and influenza. No one had yet figured out why these plagues took hold, or how to help the afflicted. Confidence in the ability of doctors to preserve life had never been lower. In 1845 medicine was a strange choice for anyone who craved professional prestige, let alone a woman.
Besides, Elizabeth’s dedication was to the life of the mind. Since childhood, she had always hidden signs of illness from her family: Sickness was for the weak. “My favourite studies were history and metaphysics,” she wrote, “and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust.”
But her metaphysical orientation eventually directed her toward the science of the body. During the winter of Elizabeth’s betweenity, Margaret Fuller—editor of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial and confidante of Emerson and Channing—published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a book that spoke directly to Elizabeth’s unsatisfied mind. Humanity would achieve a moral awakening, Fuller insisted, only when women enjoyed the same independence as men—a step that women must claim for themselves rather than waiting for men to grant it. “I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers,” Fuller wrote. “If you ask me what offices they may fill; I reply—any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will.” The Dial, in which Fuller’s ideas first appeared, was a fixture among the reading materials in the Blackwell parlor. “I believe that, at present, women are the best helpers of one another,” Fuller declared, her words reinforcing the suggestion of Elizabeth’s dying friend. Could it be that “doctor” was the office Elizabeth was meant to fill?
The Doctors Blackwell Page 3
