Elizabeth’s dim view of females was not limited to teenagers. In Charleston she was introduced to Emma Willard, founder of New York’s Troy Female Seminary, the first school to offer girls a secondary curriculum comparable to what their brothers could expect. Now approaching sixty, “the famous Trojan” traveled the country as an advocate for women’s education and wrote extensively on history and geography. “I did not know till nearly the close of her short stay,” Elizabeth reported with breathtaking scorn, “that she was a pretender to medical knowledge.” Willard had spent years investigating the intricacies of the human circulatory system and was about to publish her findings. “I fear however that the book will not add to Mrs Willard’s reputation,” Elizabeth scoffed. “I should judge her, not very profound, though possessed of much varied information.” Willard enjoyed national recognition and was venerable enough to be her grandmother, but Elizabeth dismissed her as a dilettante in danger of undermining her own more serious-minded quest. “A grand discovery by her is not very probable,” she wrote, “on a subject to which intelligent men have devoted their whole lives.”
Willard, fortunately, felt no such wariness. She referred Elizabeth to her friend Dr. Joseph Warrington, a sympathetic Philadelphia Quaker. Though he was inclined to believe that Elizabeth would find the pursuit of nursing smoother, he added, “I beg thee to believe with me that if the project be of divine origin it will sooner or later surely be accomplished.”
In May 1847, after a year and a half among the schoolgirls of Charleston, Elizabeth left for Philadelphia, the first city of American medicine, ready to put all her energy toward the pursuit of medical school admission. Her mentor Samuel Dickson was well connected at the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Warrington, cautiously encouraging, had declared himself an ally. And Anna was already there.
Anna—who, unlike Elizabeth, had no qualms about discussing her aches and pains—had grown enamored of unorthodox routes to wellness. Scientific observation and experimentation had fostered a growing skepticism regarding the authority of doctors. Several schools of alternative practice had emerged in response to the excesses of medical orthodoxy, dependent as it was on bloodletting and drugs whose effects were often more debilitating than the original complaint. The body was as mysterious in its workings as ever, but what if the highest authority on its well-being was the individual who inhabited it? “Know thyself,” said the Transcendentalists. While alternative practices might have been less painful, however, it was unclear that they were any more effective.
The Thomsonians, taking their name from New Hampshire farmer Samuel Thomson, held that all disease arose in cold and was dispelled by heat; the Thomsonian pharmacopeia consisted almost entirely of red pepper, steam, and lobelia, an emetic commonly known as “pukeweed.” Thomson’s ideas had been subsumed into the Eclectic school, a botanical approach that aimed to reform the excesses of medical orthodoxy while preserving its grounding in empirical scientific knowledge and training, combining the soundest ideas from a variety of perspectives. Poised to overtake the Eclectics in popularity was homeopathy, which viewed disease in a more spiritual light and prescribed minute doses of mostly botanical preparations according to the “law of similars”: the correct medication for a given illness would be the one that caused the symptoms of that illness in a healthy person.
Other techniques strayed further from convention. Mesmerism—named for the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer—had emerged a decade earlier. Mesmer believed that a form of energy he called “animal magnetism” emanated from every creature; illness resulted from blockage of this flow and could be removed by a practitioner skilled in directing his or her own vital energy toward the sufferer. Mesmerists staged popular demonstrations, hypnotizing headaches away and reorienting the body’s energy with the application of magnets or simply by touch. While recovering at Brook Farm, Anna had experimented with magnetic treatments, lamenting in the wake of her trauma at St. Ann’s that she was “thin as an aspen leaf, and just about as nervous.” And then there was hydropathy, or the “water cure,” which prescribed restorative bathing, sweating, and drinking, under the assumption that flooding the body with pure water would flush away whatever might be poisoning it.
Anna had come to Philadelphia to seek treatment at Dr. Schifferdecker’s Hydropathic Institute, renting a room in the home of William and Sarah Elder, a Quaker doctor and his wife. Elizabeth liked the encouraging Elders, “a thinking talking couple,” but thought Dr. Schifferdecker was a charlatan. “Poor A,” wrote her brother Sam. “I am very glad E. is near her with her cool, unimpassioned judgment.” Elizabeth’s criticism, however, was more for the man than for his method. She remained steadfast in her pursuit of a medical credential from a regular, allopathic school—she could hardly expect to win societal approval otherwise—but her oldest sister’s alternative fascinations would have a significant impact on her own approach to medicine. She was, paradoxically, seeking legitimacy in a field whose legitimacy was currently in flux. She would not rule out techniques that seemed effective, whatever their provenance.
While Anna took the water cure, Elizabeth sought interviews with Philadelphia’s leading physicians and sent letters of inquiry to medical colleges in both Philadelphia and New York. At the University of Pennsylvania, the oldest and most august American medical school, Dr. Samuel Jackson burst out laughing at her request. Dr. William Darrach stared at her for a disconcertingly long pause, then refused either to admit her to his lectures or to explain why. “The subject is a novel one, madam,” he ventured at last. “I have nothing to say either for or against it.” Dr. William Ashmead sent word that his feelings on a woman studying medicine were so outraged he would rather not meet the woman in question face to face. All of Elizabeth’s applications were rejected.
The objections of the medical establishment followed divergent tracks. On the one hand, no true lady would leave the purity of the domestic sphere to study the corruptions of the human body. On the other, what if female doctors were a resounding success, and female patients preferred them? The dean of one school summed up these fears: “You cannot expect us to furnish you with a stick to break our heads with.” Even those rare men who approved of Elizabeth’s goal balked at the notion of a woman studying anatomy alongside men. Her only way forward, they told her, was to pose as a man—somewhere far away, perhaps in Paris, where the excellent medical instruction was free, and attitudes less puritanical. The scandal of a cross-dressing woman, apparently, was nothing compared to the horror of a female in the lecture room.
But to Elizabeth, achieving a diploma in disguise missed the point. “It was to my mind a moral crusade on which I had entered,” she wrote, “and it must be pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to accomplish its end.” If she was to be a beacon, she could not hide herself. She had never wanted to be a man—she wanted, as a woman, to enjoy the same level of respect and freedom men took for granted.
“I cannot tell you how much I would like you to be studying with me,” she wrote to Emily in Cincinnati. “I have calculated again & again, but find no way to obtain such an end.” She reported excitedly on the chance to observe Dr. Jonathan Moses Allen’s private anatomy class, on hernia. “That is to be my introduction,” she wrote. “Rather formidable is it not?” (More formidable than she knew: Allen would go on to write The Practical Anatomist, a classroom bible for medical students.) He led her through a dissection of the human wrist: the eight tiny bones with their lacing of ligaments that were the mechanism of so much graceful expression, whether the flourish of a paintbrush or the striking of a chord at the piano. “The beauty of the tendons and exquisite arrangements of this part of the body struck my artistic sense,” Elizabeth wrote, “and appealed to the sentiment of reverence with which this anatomical branch of study was ever afterwards invested in my mind.”
She also made the acquaintance of Paulina Kellogg Wright, a young widow known for her lectures on physiology to female audiences, using a papier-mâ
ché model imported from France. Though Wright’s purpose was different—she promoted basic knowledge of the body as a foundation for public health—she and Elizabeth joined forces briefly in search of anatomical specimens. The trade in cadavers was largely unregulated, and the visceral horror most felt at the idea of dissection—linked to a Christian belief that only intact bodies had a chance at resurrection—meant that bodies were in chronically short supply. Grave robbers, known sardonically as “resurrectionists,” quietly supplied the most august institutions. A large proportion of the specimens on American dissecting tables were black: the bodies of both enslaved and free black people, buried, often uncoffined, in segregated ground outside the security of churchyards, were easier to steal. The bodies of babies, easier to transport and plentiful in an era of high infant mortality, were cheapest. In a letter to Sam in late summer, Elizabeth mentioned casually that she and Mrs. Wright were hoping “to purchase a black baby & dissect.” The grisly collision of her two pursuits, abolition and anatomy, went unacknowledged.
Rejected by every institution to which she had applied, Elizabeth acted on a whim and traveled to New York, where Marian was visiting, for a rare holiday with her clear-sighted older sister. “I determined not to study or think or do anything that I had been accustomed to,” she wrote, “but walk & bathe eat sleep laugh & flirt.” The vacation was refreshing, but self-indulgence—not to mention flirting—was not in Elizabeth’s nature. “I must accomplish my end,” she had written to Emma Willard. “I would sooner die than give it up.”
Upon her return to Philadelphia, she sent off a new flurry of applications to a dozen provincial medical colleges across New England. It was already August, and the next term would start in October; there was hardly enough time for good news she could act upon. But it was too late now to turn back.
CHAPTER 3
ADMISSION
The young men of Geneva Medical College were some weeks into the new term of 1847 when the dean of faculty, Charles A. Lee, visited their lecture hall, a letter in his hand.
The worry lines in his perennially concerned expression deeper than usual, Dr. Lee cleared his throat. He held, he announced with a quaver, the “most extraordinary request which had ever been made to the faculty.” A young lady, studying privately with an eminent physician in Philadelphia, had applied, with her mentor’s endorsement, for admission to their school. Several prominent medical colleges had already refused her. The faculty at Geneva had decided to put the issue to a student vote, Lee continued, with the stipulation that a single nay could turn the decision against the unusual lady in question. Their prompt attention to this matter would be appreciated. Lee refolded the letter and departed.
Two things were clear to the assembled young men. First, their professors were cowards: too timid to reject this unprecedented request out of hand, not bold enough to embrace it. And second, the students had been handed the power to make serious mischief.
Tucked away among the Finger Lakes of western New York State, Geneva College was a modest institution, founded to offer the young men of the region a classical education in two graceful stone halls, Geneva and Trinity, perched above a prosperous village at the northern tip of Seneca Lake. A third building soon rose between the original two to house the medical department, but no one liked the idea of cadavers at the heart of the college. Middle Building became the library, and a spacious new medical building, topped with a domed skylight, was completed in 1843 at a discreet distance up the street.*
Of the 113 students in the medical class of 1847–48, nearly all were local. They were boisterous boys with more energy than polish; young men with intellectual and social ambition generally migrated to cities and studied law. Medicine, as a profession, was considered more manual than cerebral, vulnerable to the taint of patent-remedy hucksters; surgery, when it was practiced at all, had not long since been the bloody craft of barbers. Though the elite medical colleges of New York and Philadelphia might include gentlemen on their rolls, tiny Geneva did not. It wasn’t uncommon for the dean to receive written complaints from townsfolk threatening legal action over the raucous behavior of his students. That fall the silence of the night had exploded when several overeager anatomy pupils, unsatisfied with the college’s supply of unclaimed bodies from nearby Auburn State Prison, tried to rob the grave of a recently interred Irishman. The dead man’s compatriots had driven them off with gunfire.
There were no absentees at a student meeting on the evening of Dr. Lee’s bizarre announcement. In speech after speech, the class clowns topped each other in extravagant support for the admission of a corseted classmate. What could be more ridiculous—or more entertaining—than a lady doctor? When the jokes were spent, the vote was called. All in favor? The roar of “AYE” rattled the windows. The air filled with tossed hats and waving handkerchiefs. Any opposed? There was a bemused silence, broken by a single, tentative “nay.”
Decades later a distinguished Geneva alumnus named Stephen Smith was still chuckling at the fate of the hapless dissenter. “At the instant, the class arose as one man and rushed to the corner from which the voice proceeded,” he recalled. “Amid screams of ‘cuff him,’ ‘crack his skull,’ ‘throw him down the stairs,’ a young man was dragged to the platform screaming ‘Aye, aye! I vote aye.’ ” The students bore their decision in triumph to the horrified faculty and promptly forgot about it. The whole farce was probably a prank cooked up by a rival school anyway, they told each other.
Three weeks later, on a dreary Monday morning, the yawning, slouching students of Geneva Medical College looked up to see their professor coming through the door of the lecture room followed by a slight feminine figure, dressed without ornament. She had a high smooth forehead, a firm set to her jaw, and fair hair parted in the center. She seated herself, placed her bonnet beneath her chair, and turned her penetrating stare toward the front of the room. A stunned silence fell like a curtain. Spines straightened; feet returned squarely to the floor.
“For the first time a lecture was given without the slightest interruption,” Stephen Smith remembered much later, “and every word could be heard as distinctly as it would if there had been but a single person in the room.” As if by magic, a classroom full of “lawless desperadoes” had been transformed into models of deportment by Elizabeth’s mere presence. Or had they? In the moment, the presence of a woman in the lecture hall was no one’s idea of a happy ending. At best, for Elizabeth, it was a vindication and a beginning. At worst, it was a freakish experiment her professors would live to regret.
The letter from Geneva College had arrived in Philadelphia at the end of October. Elizabeth opened it with a flickering mixture of resignation and stubborn hope.
“At a meeting of the entire Medical Class of Geneva Medical College, held this day, October 20, 1847,” it began, “the following Resolutions were unanimously adopted:
Resolved—That one of the radical principles of a Republican Government is the universal education of both sexes; that to every branch of scientific education the door should be open equally to all; that the application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our class, meets our entire approbation; and in extending our unanimous invitation, we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.
Resolved—That a copy of these proceedings be signed by the Chairman and transmitted to Elizabeth Blackwell.
The faculty, Dr. Lee explained disingenuously, had decided to lay Elizabeth’s application before the young men among whom she would study. “I send you the results of their deliberations,” Lee wrote, “and need only add that there are no fears but that you can, by judicious management, not only ‘disarm criticism,’ but elevate yourself without detracting, in the least, from the dignity of the profession.” Elizabeth did not dwell on the lukewarm endorsement, or the fact that the term had already started. An acceptance was an acceptance. And if Lee chose to close by wishing her “success in your undertaking, which some may dee
m bold in the present state of society,” she would have to assume he wasn’t one of those “some.”
She had to tell Emily. “Dear Milly,” she began, and quoted all the best bits at length: principles of Republican government! entire approbation! unanimous invitation! “Isn’t that fine and liberal?” she crowed. “It is accompanied by a few words of encouragement from one of the Professors—oh really it was refreshing. I fairly jumped for joy—it seemed to me that I was the luckiest mortal on the face of the earth, & that henceforth no difficulty remained.” But giddiness was not Elizabeth’s natural state, and her “fit of rapture” soon subsided. Studying the circular Dr. Lee had enclosed, she reported to Emily on the college’s virtues: “well supplied museums & cabinet of Natural History, a library, plenty of material for dissection, clinical lectures, & surgical operations—the charges moderate & boarding reasonable.” She heaved a sigh of triumphant relief (“though not surprise,” she was quick to insist, “for failure never seemed possible”), packed her trunk, bought a train ticket, and left for Geneva, entirely unaware of the farcical circumstances of her acceptance.
Train travel, less than two decades old, was a grueling ordeal: the wooden cars jolted only slightly less than the stagecoaches they were replacing, the hard seats were like church pews, the floorboards were sticky with tobacco juice. A stove perched in a corner belched too much heat into the cramped box of passengers, but opening a window invited a choking blast of dust and smoke and sparks. The cars could make about twenty miles per hour, as long as the tracks remained clear of snow, mud, or wandering cows. Derailments were common.
In the chill and deserted darkness of a rainy Saturday night in November, the exhausted and soot-streaked twenty-six-year-old woman who stepped off the train in Geneva felt somewhat less confident than the one who had left Philadelphia two days earlier. The next day was the Sabbath, but she would have no leisure to observe it. She needed a place to live, she needed to learn her way around a new town, and she needed to present herself to a group of professors who had spent the last week dreading her arrival.
The Doctors Blackwell Page 5
