Elizabeth Blackwell

We read the excellent Judy Moody books to son #1, and now we have started reading the first one in the series to son #2.  I can't remember how we first came across the books, but if you are not familiar with them, you can find out more about Judy and the books on her website.

You may by now be wondering what Judy has to do with the title of this post.  Well, Judy knows about Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman doctor, and wants to be a doctor too.  Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to be awarded an MD degree in the United States, in 1849.  She supported medical education for women, and wrote books about it, and founded a hospital in New York in 1857 as a way to enable women to get medical internships.  She was actually born in Bristol, England, and moved to the United States as a child.

Here are some places to find out more:

National Library of Medicine - Changing the Face of Medicine.  This site celebrates America's women physicians, with biographies of physicians past and present.

National Women's History Museum, Alexandria, Virginia (as it happens, Judy Moody's home state).

Schlesinger Library Newsletter, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard.   The Library has information about the Blackwell family, which included Elizabeth's sister Emily, who with her promoted medical education for women.  Other family members included important people in the abolition movement, and the first woman church minister in the United States.  The Library's information about the family includes a link to digitised family papers.  

Wellcome Trust

Hobart and William Smith Colleges,  New York State.  The colleges are the successor to Geneva Medical College, where Blackwell studied.

Science Museum, London.

NNDB. Biographical site, whose NNDB Mapper enables you to explore links between the subjects of the biographies and learned societies.  There are no links for Blackwell, not yet, anyway.

Blackwell's Wikipedia entry is quite extensive and has links to a range of other material.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman in England to qualify in medicine, met Blackwell, and needs to have a post all to herself.