1847

Eliz. Blackwell begins attending first of two four-months series of lectures at Geneva Medical College, after unanimous vote of student body to admit her (they thought it was a joke).  She spends six months between terms at Phila’s Bleckley Almshouse (later, PGH), where her room was right off women’s syphilitic ward.  Graduated 1st in class in 1848 with thesis, subsequently published, on (epidemic) typhus (ship fever).  Then back to Phila where she attended lectures at Jefferson, then off to Paris in 1849, where she resumed student status to study midwifery/obstetrics at La Maternité, France’s largest public maternity hospital, where she contracted purulent ophthalmia from an infant delivered from a gonorrheal parturient, with left eye surgically removed in 1850.   Then to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, where she was mentored by James Paget and befriended by Lady Byron and Florence Nightingale.  Returns to NYC in 1853 and begins practice (with few patients) and opened New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children in 1854, the same year her sister Emily Blackwell graduated from Cleveland Medical College. After graduation, Emily set sail for Edinburgh to attend James Young Simpson and learn ob/gyn.  Simpson’s surgical treatment of her cousin Marie’s cervical prolapse practically killed her.