The allure of medicine may have been reinforced by her brother Sam, trapped in tedious bookkeeping jobs that left him no leisure for idealism. “If I had some noble, glorious aim, clearly defined before me in life, I think I could be truly happy,” he wrote. “I have thought that as a physician I might be happy, & truly well employed in a daily business of beneficence.”
Elizabeth was not drawn to the daily business of beneficence—that would involve uncomfortably intimate contact with individual sufferers—but becoming a doctor as qualified as any man was a noble ideological quest, a way of proving Margaret Fuller’s faith in woman’s equal aptitude. Elizabeth’s attraction to this challenge wrestled with her distaste for human biology and won. There was, moreover, the added incentive of the recognition that such an extraordinary accomplishment might bring. She had no use for most social interaction, but she had no objection to fame. “Eliz. is thinking seriously of studying Medicine,” Sam recorded that spring.
Embarking on such a quest would also give Elizabeth a conclusive answer to a tiresome question: what about marriage? Though her solitary circumstances might have been of her own choosing, her pride demanded a narrative that justified the choice. Falling in love, a “common malady” like any physical illness, was likewise a weakness, she decided. “I became impatient of the disturbing influence exercised by the other sex,” she wrote—a disturbance, she confessed, to which she felt particularly susceptible. “But whenever I became sufficiently intimate with any individual to be able to realise what a life association might mean,” she continued, “I shrank from the prospect, disappointed or repelled.” She loved the idea of love, not the reality of emotional connection—and physical connection was even harder to contemplate. Evidence of intimacy with another, at any stage of Elizabeth’s life, is scarce in the letters and journals she left behind, but whether her romances were real or imagined, the work of becoming a doctor would both forestall love and explain its absence. “I must have something to engross my thoughts,” she wrote, “some object in life which will fill this vacuum and prevent this sad wearing away of the heart.” Elizabeth considered medicine as a novice might contemplate the convent: as a noble vocation and a refuge from worldly entanglements.
Having decided what to pursue, the next step was how. Elizabeth visited doctors in Cincinnati and wrote to others in New York, receiving everywhere the same reaction: a female physician was an interesting idea, but given the long years and great expense of study, and the intellectual and physical endurance required to practice, not to mention the basic truth that no female would be welcome among male students in a medical lecture hall or operating theater, it was quite impossible. Frankly, what self-respecting woman would voluntarily expose herself to the naked realities of the body in the company of men? And then there was the unmentionable question of such a woman’s own body, incapacitated monthly. Bedrest was a common prescription for menstrual complaints, and what would a lady doctor’s patients do then? Even Elizabeth’s friend Harriet Beecher Stowe was dubious. Certainly a woman doctor would be “highly useful,” she conceded, but the forces ranged against Elizabeth, which she must “either crush or be crushed by,” were formidable.
Of course, women had always served as healers—whether revered as angels at the bedside, or reviled (though still, quietly, consulted) as uncomfortably powerful initiates into the secrets of witchcraft. American colonists, among whom doctors were scarce, had depended on wives and mothers and sisters to provide first aid and nursing, not to mention assistance at childbirth. But as eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas introduced empirical science and new techniques into the healing arts—like the use of forceps during delivery—female practitioners were replaced by male professionals. As the establishment of medical schools and societies created new frameworks of legitimacy, women were pushed further toward the margins. However: in the last few decades, as medical schools began to proliferate in the United States, led by physicians who hoped to raise the profession to the same level of dignity it enjoyed in Europe, it was perhaps easier to argue for a woman’s right to be a doctor. If she attended the same lectures and passed the same examinations as a man, who could deny her qualifications?
There remained only the daunting fact that no woman had ever gained admittance. It had nothing to do with entrance standards. Newly minted American medical schools, unlike liberal arts colleges and law schools, often had none: any student who could pay the fees was welcome. Any male student, that is. And Elizabeth had no money. As someone who scorned the easy path, however, these apparently insurmountable obstacles only hardened her resolve. “The idea of winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle,” she wrote, “and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.”
It was Anna, bestowing largesse from the superior vantage of age and secure employment at St. Ann’s in Flushing, who propelled Elizabeth forward with word of a teaching position in Asheville, North Carolina. There were better reasons than a teacher’s salary to venture so far away. It would be another chance to take abolitionist ideas into slave territory, and more important, the proprietor of the school in question, the Reverend John Dickson, had previously been a doctor. Medical students usually studied with an established physician before enrolling in formal lectures. In Dr. Dickson’s employ, with access to his medical books, Elizabeth would be able to save money toward her education even as she began it.
The 350-mile journey, by cramped stagecoach on jolting, ungraded roads over the Alleghenies and the Appalachians, would take more than a week. Elizabeth had heard terrifying reports of “drunken drivers galloping their horses at full speed down perpendicular mountains,” and the prospect of unaccompanied nights at lonely roadside inns was unattractive. Sam, however, was only too happy to leave his uninspiring duties, hire a wagon, and drive his sister to her new post. In June 1845, less than three weeks after receiving Anna’s suggestion, Elizabeth and Sam were on their way to Asheville, with thirteen-year-old Howard tagging along for the adventure. They packed the wagon with Elizabeth’s books and trunks and carpetbags and added a chessboard and two loaded pistols.
It was to Emily, still studying in New York, that Elizabeth wrote the fullest account of her journey, after taking “Miss Student” to task for failing to write. (“What a very unnatural sister you are,” she scolded, “to take no more notice of my existence than if I were a toad or President Polk.”) The first day on the road, Elizabeth confessed, she had felt “as blue as a forget-me-not,” drenched by a torrent of rain and a relentless stream of Sam’s painful puns. But her mood lightened with the skies, and she proved a more intrepid traveler than her brothers. Reaching a ford across Kentucky’s Cumberland River in the gathering dusk, the little party was dismayed by the expanse of tumbling water, darkened by close-growing trees climbing the valley’s steep sides and made eerie by the “goblin groans of myriad frogs.” Hallooing across, they heard an answering hail encouraging them to march straight from bank to bank, but Sam couldn’t muster the nerve. “Shall I say there’s a lady in the carriage?” he asked Elizabeth. In response to this fiction of a frightened female, a boy on horseback splashed over to guide them toward dinner and a warm bed.
Asheville was a tiny dot in the grandeur of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Elizabeth found the landscape inspiring and the people less so: to her critical eye, they were another batch of “country boobies and boobyesses.” Though the Dicksons’ green-shuttered residence was undeniably attractive, and their Female Academy one of Asheville’s proudest institutions, Elizabeth’s mood plunged as her brothers’ departure approached. “I grew so doleful that I almost meditated suicide, it seemed to me that the world was one vale of gloom,” she wrote. “I must lead a cold lonely life, on the confines of barbarism, amid totally uninteresting people.” And her mattress was full of fleas, who “all turned out to welcome me, with true Southern hospitality.”
Elizabeth would remember this nadir as a catalyst for revelation. “I had many causes of deep
suffering that I had never imparted to anyone, & I felt lonely & forsaken by every friend,” she wrote.
I stood one starlight night at my window—I shall never forget it—the mountains stood round black & gloomy, the wind sighed mournfully in the oak trees, & the stars seemed to mock me with their cold quiet twinkling. I cried in deep sorrow, “Jesus have you too forsaken me!” and in the instant a peaceful happiness, that I had never known before seemed to take possession of me; it was as if some bright spirit had shed its atmosphere around, & entered with every breath I drew.
She echoed the words of Jesus on the cross without apparent irony. Elizabeth had always yearned to see herself as the protagonist of an important story; now, officially embarked on her medical quest, she could. Henceforth “I knew that, however insignificant my individual effort might be, it was in a right direction, and in accordance with the great providential ordering of our race’s progress.”
Whether or not the world yet acknowledged it, she was a medical student. An elderly housemaid thanked her for soothing away a headache—“my first professional cure,” Elizabeth wrote gaily—and the household affectionately took to calling her “Dr. Blackwell,” a title she penned with an extra flourish in her letter. When someone found a large dead beetle, she decided to perform her first dissection. “I thought it would make a capital beginning,” she wrote, but the intention was easier than the act. Spreading out a clean sheet of paper, she staked the insect to her desk with a hairpin, opened her penknife, grasped the mother-of-pearl handle, and—hesitated. The place where the head joined the body, being narrowest, seemed like the easiest place to start, and soon the beetle was in two pieces. Finally, with a shudder of disgust, she sliced the body in half—but the creature having died some time ago, all she found within was yellowish dust. “The anatomy was by no means interesting,” she wrote wryly, “but the moral courage exercised was of a high order.”
Dr. Dickson borrowed an articulated human skeleton for her to study—“a great treat”—and seemed to support her outrageous plans, though she found it difficult to discuss them. “I only wish he were one with whom I could converse freely,” Elizabeth wrote, “but I think it would be too hard a trial to subject him to.” It was less daunting to discuss Dickson’s politics. Though a slave owner himself, he professed an antipathy to slavery strong enough that Elizabeth deemed him “one of the most right minded men I have ever known.” It was hard to condemn him for his ideals when he was at that moment helping her to realize her own.
Elizabeth had returned to the south “determined,” she wrote, “to teach all the slaves I could to read & write & elevate them in every way in my power, as the only way in which I could reconcile it to my conscience to live amongst them.” Dickson applauded her idealism, but it was illegal in North Carolina to teach slaves to read, and he refused to break the law. Instead, with the help of Mrs. Dickson, Elizabeth organized a Sunday school providing “oral instruction” on moral ideas. “I assure you it felt a little odd,” she wrote, “sitting down in front of those degraded little beings, to teach them a religion which their owners professed to follow while violating its very first principles.”
The “strong electric friendship” she craved, the kind of idealized communion “where deep calleth unto deep,” would not be found in Asheville, but Elizabeth was not bothered. “I always have had somewhat of the anchorite in my composition,” she wrote. As one of her colleagues put it, “Miss Blackwell is never less alone, than when alone.” Between her job, her studies, and her Sunday school, Elizabeth’s life was, for the moment, satisfyingly full. “I feel very wakeful, just at present,” she wrote. “My brain is as busy as it can be, & consequently I’m happy.”
Emily and Anna were not. On the same late July afternoon when Elizabeth was describing her busy days in Asheville, Anna was writing a grimmer letter home from St. Ann’s in New York. “It is so painful to be convinced that one whom one has loved and admired is really unworthy of confidence,” she began. She had abruptly resigned, she announced, as a result of her employer Dr. Schroeder’s inappropriate behavior. “All his kind professions of respect,” she wrote, “have been succeeded by a system of petty persecution, general annoyance, and unbearable insolence, which have fairly martyrized me.”
Emily scrawled a postscript across Anna’s last page. “I assure you that she has not spoken of it half as severely as it deserves,” she insisted. “His conduct toward her almost ever since I have been here has been very doubtful, but for the last three weeks it had been equally unworthy of a Christian and a gentleman.” Their brother Henry’s outraged reaction shed some light on Schroeder’s unmentioned transgressions. “A most unscrupulous liar & consummate scoundrel!” he exploded. “In short, a perfect Onderdonk.” Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk, Episcopal bishop of New York, had recently been brought to trial on multiple charges of groping female parishioners. (“He thrust his hand in my bosom,” one plaintiff testified.) Whether or not Schroeder’s crime matched Onderdonk’s, from this point on Anna would be increasingly debilitated by vague and chronic ill health, and drawn irresistibly toward whatever new fad promised to relieve her. She never held a classroom teaching job again.
Leaving Emily with friends in New York, Anna retreated to Brook Farm, the utopian community near Boston founded by Transcendentalists and frequented by William Henry Channing. Brook Farm had recently embarked on an ambitious plan to remake itself according to Charles Fourier’s principles of Associationism, thanks in part to the arrival of Albert Brisbane, the man responsible for popularizing Fourier’s ideas in America. Unfortunately, this was the beginning of the end for the Brook Farm experiment, but Anna developed a warm regard for the persuasive Brisbane. By the fall of 1845, she was back in New York, and so was Brisbane, taking a personal interest in instructing her on Fourier’s ideas regarding free love.
Emily lingered in New York with Anna, the two women moving among generous friends and furnished lodgings. Anna was earning a little as a journalist, writing reviews for magazines, and both women took private pupils. Having had a taste of concentrated study during her year at St. Ann’s, Emily was desperate to continue her work in languages and mathematics, and she continued to be intrigued by the utopianism she was hearing from Anna and her friend Mr. Brisbane. She explored Fourier’s ideas not with Elizabeth’s idealism or Anna’s impulsive passion but with her own considerable intellectual focus, “reading,” Elizabeth reported approvingly, “a work in five volumes, of 500 pages each.” Emily was too practical to be swept away by Fourier’s vision, but her seriousness resonated with Elizabeth—surely Emily was the most kindred of her siblings. “Your letters always come to me like a puff of fresh North wind in a Summer’s day,” she wrote to Emily. “I generally brush my hair & straighten my things after reading them.”
In the spring of 1846, after nearly two years away, Emily returned to Walnut Hills, impressing the home folk with her gains in both height and maturity. “So our young giantess is actually arrived,” Elizabeth wrote. “Why didn’t some of you let me know?” She had heard from Cincinnati friends that Emily was now “quite a genius,” though “this I won’t mention, lest Emily should see it.”
The Dicksons’ school in Asheville closed at the end of 1845, but Elizabeth had accepted an invitation from John Dickson’s brother in Charleston. Dr. Samuel Henry Dickson had received his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania—the oldest and most elite American medical school—and helped found the Medical College of South Carolina. His library held over a thousand volumes, and his sister-in-law ran a fashionable boarding school for girls that was in need of a piano teacher.
Samuel Dickson was the most eminent physician Elizabeth had yet encountered. It took her months to muster the courage to consult him directly about her ambitions. “The more I thought of the conversation, the more nervous I became,” she wrote, worrying that she “might perhaps lose a friend without gaining a teacher.” But Dickson, when she at last confided in him, surprised her. “He thinks my d
esire of obtaining a thorough scientific education quite feasible,” Elizabeth exulted. “When we finished the conversation my head burned with pleasure, I felt it to be the first step gained, and an all important one.” Fueled by optimism, she began to enjoy the pursuit of science. “I trace out the wonderful nervous fibres of the body,” she wrote, “with the same interest that I once sought for the links that unite the finite with the infinite.” She felt increasingly confident that she could reach the summit of her chosen mountain and become an example to the world; after that, she wrote, “whether I devote my life to the practice is another question that experience must determine.” But it was her aptitude for the work that would determine her future, not her gender. “I think I have sufficient hardness to be entirely unaffected by great agony,” she mused. “I do not think any case would keep me awake at night.”
What did keep her awake was the irritating proximity of giddy schoolgirls. “Do listen,” she cried to a fellow teacher, jerked awake again one night by agonized shrieks, “they must be whipping a poor negro; isn’t it abominable?” But the noise was coming from across the corridor. Yanking open the dormitory door, Elizabeth was mobbed by “six girls, all screaming at the top of their voices, as pale as their nightgowns, and some of them almost in fits.” The original source of their terror, it emerged, was the sound of a hairbrush falling to the floor.
The Doctors Blackwell Page 4
