Medicine: Women Doctors

Elizabeth Blackwell, a blue-eyed blonde, was a sister-in-law of Lucy Stone, the famed 19th-Century feminist. In 1847, after trying in vain to enter eleven medical schools, she was admitted to Geneva Medical College, at Geneva, N. Y. (now Syracuse University Medical School). At Geneva, the entire student body had demanded her admission. A Boston medical journal spoke of her with arch masculinity as "a pretty little specimen of the feminine gender . . . [who] comes into the class with great composure, takes off her bonnet . . . exposing a fine phrenology."...