Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwellwas a British-born physician, notable as the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, as well as the first woman on the UK Medical Register. She was the first woman to graduate from medical school, a pioneer in promoting the education of women in medicine in the United States, and a social and moral reformer in both the United States and in the United Kingdom. Her sister Emily was the third woman in the US...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDoctor
Date of Birth3 February 1821
CityBristol, England
CountryUnited States of America
I felt more than ever the necessity of my mission. But I went home out of spirits, I hardly know why. I must work by myself all life long.
The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.
It is a well-established fact that in healthy loving women, uninjured by the too frequent lesions which result from childbirth, increasing physical satisfaction attaches to the ultimate physical expression of love. ... Love between the sexes is the highest and mightiest form of human sexual passion.
I, who so love a hermit life for a good part of the day, find myself living in public, and almost losing my identity.
[On sex:] ... the total deprivation of it produces irritability.
Methods and conclusions formed by half the race only, must necessarily require revision as the other half of humanity rises into conscious responsibility.
Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.
It is well worth the efforts of a lifetime to have attained knowledge which justifies an attack on the root of all evil ... which asserts that because forms of evil have always existed in society, therefore they must always exist.
A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman.
Health has its science, as well as disease.
It is not easy to be a pioneer but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.
When life follows the course of our desires, it is easy to be swept along without thought.
The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research.
A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel.