Women in White Coats E-Book

Olivia Campbell

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 507

Beschreibung

The New York Times Bestseller The triumphant story of three courageous women who become the first female doctors. 'These women changed the world' - Nina Sankovitch, bestselling author of American Rebels In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and painful, and women faced damaging social stigma from illness. Despite countless obstacles, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman's place in the male-dominated medical field. The three pioneers earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same, then built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges – creating for the first time medical care for women by women.

Leseprobe

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by Park Row Books 2021

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Olivia Campbell 2021

The right of Olivia Campbell to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800752467 eISBN: 9781800752474

To Mom, Grandma, Laura, Ellen, Louisa, MaryAnn, Lara, Sarah and all of the other ladies in my life who showed me that there’s nothing tenacious, independent women can’t do.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue: The Forgotten History of Healing

Chapter One: A Lady Doctor

Chapter Two: Surely, She Is a Joke

Chapter Three: Another Elizabeth Blazes the Trail

Chapter Four: More Than a Nurse

Chapter Five: Young Sophia

Chapter Six: Sophia in America

Chapter Seven: Facing Down Hurdles as America’s First Woman Doctor

Chapter Eight: Changing the Culture, One Patient at a Time

Chapter Nine: Lizzie Is Pushed into Private Study

Chapter Ten: The Blackwells Welcome Sophia in New York

Chapter Eleven: Lizzie Takes On London

Chapter Twelve: Sophia Storms Edinburgh

Chapter Thirteen: Emily’s Turn to Shine in New York

Chapter Fourteen: A Lady Doctor Gets Married

Chapter Fifteen: The Campaign in Edinburgh Ends

Chapter Sixteen: Finding a Way Forward

Chapter Seventeen: Societies and Controversies

Chapter Eighteen: A Place All Their Own in London

Chapter Nineteen: On to Separate Paths

Epilogue: A Lasting Legacy

Acknowledgments

Author Note

Select Bibliography

Notes on Sources

PROLOGUE

The Forgotten History of Healing

When Elizabeth Blackwell decided to become the first woman doctor, in many ways she wasn’t actually the first. Women have delivered healthcare across the globe for centuries as herbalists, healer-priestesses, shamans, apothecaries, healers, wise women, witch doctors, diviners, surgeons, nurses, and midwives.1 But this rich history is largely overlooked, and very few names have weathered the passing of time.

Agnodice is one of the earliest named female physicians in the historical record. The story goes that she became a doctor in the fourth century BCE to save the women of Athens from dying of treatable illnesses because they didn’t want to see male physicians. It was illegal for women to be doctors, so Agnodice set up practice disguised as a man. To show her patients who she really was, she flashed her genitalia. Soon, jealous male doctors found out and convicted Agnodice of illegally practicing medicine. In the final dramatic showdown, the women of Athens rushed into the courtroom to defend her and the ban against women physicians was overturned.

There’s only one problem with this tale: there was no law against women practicing medicine in ancient Greece. This inconsistency, paired with the fantastical elements of the story, is enough to convince some scholars that Agnodice didn’t exist. Other scholars believe she was a real person, who surely encountered persecution even if she wasn’t breaking any official law.

This is how we are introduced to historical medical women: biographies sprinkled with doubts, caveats, clauses; lives methodically dissected under a microscope by scholar after scholar looking for any hint of error, any crumb of fabrication to wave around gleefully as proof that this woman wasn’t what we thought. We don’t often hear about the historical contributions of women’s medical brilliance, but when we do, we are taught to question the very core of such claims. Men rarely enjoy such scrutiny.

A relative scarcity of women officially labeled as professional medical practitioners in historical texts is not because they didn’t exist, but rather because their occupations were not labeled as frequently as men’s. As “wise women” healers or midwives, their activities may not have been believed to warrant recording. Throughout much of history, a man’s entire household would have been involved in his occupational activities. Spouses and children of physicians or apothecaries would have helped mix medicines, visit the sick, and administer treatments; the family of a barber surgeon helped him pull teeth and set broken bones. And widowed wives took over those family businesses.

Most areas in Europe would have had a wise woman or man who inherited the role of village healer, and women were largely the ones called upon to tend sick or dying family members; the ones sent to care for sick or dying neighbors who had no other family to care for them. As late as the 1500s, King Henry VIII was still granting the occasional medical license “to certain women to attend the sick poor who could not afford to pay the fees of regular practitioners.” In medieval France, about one hundred women have been identified as medical practitioners (alongside seven thousand men). Nuns soon became the main practitioners of the healing arts; convents could be considered proto-hospitals. Nuns would tend medicinal herb gardens, dress soldiers’ battle wounds, and nurse ill villagers back to health.

When medicine began to be solidified as a profession during the thirteenth century—its practice now requiring university training and licensure—patriarchal control swept in. Women could not become “official” doctors since most universities wouldn’t admit them. Outside of England and France, some institutions were more amenable. In 1390, Italian physician Dorotea Bucca took over for her father as chair of medicine at the University of Bologna, a post she held for more than forty years. Still, such women were the exceptions, not the rule.

Professionalization further sidelined women because book learning was now viewed as superior to any wisdom passed down orally, like most of women’s folk medicine was.

Women’s claims of medical prowess began to be questioned in real time, not by history scholars, but by the women’s newly professionalized male contemporaries. Lay women healers were vilified as dangerously incompetent because they lacked a classical education (which they couldn’t obtain even if they wanted to). In 1421, English physicians petitioned parliament and King Henry V to request that no women practice medicine “under payne of long imprisonment” and steep fines, declaring those who tried “worthless and presumptuous women who usurped the profession.” Women who were found guilty of practicing medicine illegally were excommunicated and fined. Things took a deadly turn when the Church stepped in.

The Church controlled most university medical schools and wanted to ensure they also monopolized its practice. Between 1400 and 1700, the Catholic and Lutheran churches executed a massive campaign to rid Europe of wise women, branding them witches or sorceresses—even the nuns! They reasoned that only through God could a person be healed, and since women weren’t ordained by Him to wield such powers, their ability to make sick people well must originate from the devil. While the Church claimed it was fighting dark magic—not medicine or women—their campaign saw more than a hundred thousand women healers burned at the stake.

This legacy of discrimination against women healers cast a wide shadow over the medical profession. Even if women did somehow manage to achieve professional qualifications, they were relegated to specialties deemed feminine: they could deliver healthcare, but only as nurses or midwives.

For Victorian women like Elizabeth Blackwell, Lizzie Garrett, and Sophia Jex-Blake to seek entrance into the male realm of medicine was a radical request to be seen as equals. It meant these women couldn’t just be students, they also had to be women’s rights activists. If they wished to fully reenter the realm of medicine as doctors, they’d have to put up a hell of a fight.

Each woman’s journey to a medical degree would vary; each was driven by vastly different motivations. One sought a degree in Scotland with disastrous results. One was forced to travel to France for her degree. One’s college application was considered a practical joke. Each would grapple with defining women’s work and purpose—as sister, wife, mother, daughter, adoptive mother, single parent, lesbian partner.

But even in the early days of their studies, each one recognized their role as trailblazers paving the way for others. They knew their actions would allow future generations of women to forge their own paths, craft their own definitions of what women’s work could be. They would never stop fighting, because they saw how women physicians could revolutionize medicine, not just for the benefit of female patients, but for everyone. History would be made by these medical women.

1 Midwifery wasn’t typically considered medicine, per se.

ONE

A Lady Doctor

Mary Donaldson was dying. One day in early 1845, Mary’s neighbor Elizabeth Blackwell stopped by to offer the ailing woman some solace and comfort. This casual chat over a cup of tea in suburban Cincinnati would turn out to change the course of medical history. Elizabeth was a frightfully small woman with a thin nose, a sweet voice, and remarkably soft, fine hands. Everything about her seemed petite, except for her mind.

The third child of the family, it was no secret that Elizabeth was her father’s favorite. He lovingly referred to her as “Little Shy.” While she may have been socially awkward, she could also be quite stubborn, happy to put all of her energies into a cause to prove a point. At a time when most women were raised to be subservient to men, Elizabeth’s parents encouraged all of their children to be knowledge-seeking independent thinkers unafraid to speak their minds.

Elizabeth’s family was somewhat new to Cincinnati, having moved frequently when Elizabeth was growing up. First, when she was eleven, her father uprooted their entire household—his eight children, pregnant wife, their governess, two servants, and two aunts—to move from Bristol, England, to New York, New York. It was a seven-week voyage on the merchant ship Cosmo, during which Elizabeth suffered terrible seasickness. Next, they moved to Jersey City, then Cincinnati where her father spent his final days.

Now, twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth sat perched by Mary Donaldson’s bed, listening to her catalog the agonizing months she’d spent in increasingly worsening abdominal pain. Mary was more than likely suffering from advanced uterine cancer. She hadn’t sought medical treatment for her symptoms at first, and when she had, her doctor only seemed to make her more uncomfortable.

“The worst part of my illness is that I am being treated by a rough unfeeling man,” Mary confided in Elizabeth, complaining that her checkups and treatment were nearly as excruciating as the illness itself. “If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.”

Elizabeth agreed that this was an unfortunate state of affairs and offered sympathy and comfort as best she could. Short wisps of Elizabeth’s wavy, reddish-blond hair escaped from its pulled-back confines and spilled across her forehead.

“You are fond of study, have health and leisure,” Mary nudged Elizabeth. “Why not study medicine?”

The question hung in the air. This time, Elizabeth disagreed, finding it difficult to hide her shock behind her wide-set bluegray eyes. “I hate everything connected with the body and could not bear the sight of a medical book,” she protested. “The very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments fills me with disgust.”

Elizabeth’s exposure to the medical field would have been limited at the time. Most women healers in history had a family member in the trade who sparked their interest, but this was not the case with Elizabeth. Her father had been a sugar refiner, her mother a devout Christian kept busy with raising their nine children. Her uncle and grandfather were both jewelers. Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother ran a successful millinery shop to support her family after her husband was convicted of forging £5 notes and banished to Australia.

Elizabeth’s most recent experience with medicine was seven years prior, when her father had become gravely ill. She watched as his doctors dosed him with brandy and arrowroot laudanum and rubbed his joints with mercurial ointment. When they left, she and her sisters took over: giving him sponge baths of muriatic acid solution, feeding him broth and brandy, and administering his medicines. He died shortly after falling sick. This firsthand exposure to medical care did nothing to pique then-seventeen-year-old Elizabeth’s interest in medicine.

It’s no wonder Elizabeth was initially repulsed by the prospect of becoming a doctor. The practice of medicine in the first half of the 1800s was a gruesome business. “Heroic” measures were the go-to treatments, such as bloodletting, blistering, and purging. Hippocrates’s theory of humors still reigned supreme. It asserted that illness was the result of an imbalance of the four humors: melancholic (cold and dry), choleric (warm and dry), sanguine (warm and wet), and phlegmatic (cold and wet). Different foods or treatments could return balance and therefore restore health. Infections were thought to be caused by an excess of blood, so bloodletting should fix a fever.

Toxic metals made up some of the early Victorians’ favorite medicines. Calomel, or mercury chloride, was believed to cure anything from cancer, tuberculosis, and cholera to syphilis, ingrown toenails, and influenza. Babies were given the white, odorless powder to soothe teething pain. Around the 1840s, megadoses were the fashion: twenty grains four times a day. Treatment was working when violent, dark diarrhea was achieved (the body trying to rid itself of the poison) and three pints of saliva was produced via excessive drooling, which we now know is actually a sign of mercury poisoning.

Arsenic, though an infamous poisoning agent, was considered to be therapeutic in small doses. Arsenic tinctures were used to treat maladies ranging from fevers and emotional disturbance to loss of libido and asthma. It was listed in the British Pharmaceutical Codex until 1907 and in the US pharmacopoeia until 1950. Another popular remedy was the everlasting pill. Made of the toxic metal antimony, ingesting it would induce a “cleansing” bout of vomiting and diarrhea. The pill was then retrieved from the patient’s excrement, washed, and tucked away to be used again by the next person in the family who took ill.

Diseases of the reproductive organs were considered a woman’s burden to bear, cancer believed to be a feminine malady. “There is no fact in the history of cancer more absolutely demonstrated than the influence exercised by sex on its development,” pioneering oncology researcher Dr. Walter Walshe proclaimed in 1846. “The female population of this country is destroyed to about two and three quarters times as great an extent by cancer as the male.”

For instance, of the 9,118 cancer-related deaths in Paris between 1830 and 1840, nearly three thousand were the result of uterine cancer. There were several reasons for this grim statistic, among them that symptoms of reproductive cancers in women often don’t show up until later and tend to mask themselves as more benign ailments. Another issue was that women often put off, or couldn’t bring themselves to consult their male physicians, and cancer is much easier to treat successfully in its earliest stages. Since cancer was known to be hereditary, seeking treatment might also reveal you to society as tainted. Even if she survived, such a diagnosis could ruin a woman’s romantic, social, and professional prospects.

In the end, doctors had little to offer a patient like Elizabeth’s friend Mary. The best they could do was ease suffering with morphine or opium and suggest some lifestyle changes they hoped would promote a healthier constitution: reduce their food intake, maintain open bowels, avoid exertion, and refrain from sex. Among the many cancer cures touted at the time were yellow dock root, Turkish figs boiled in milk, zapping tumors with electricity or injecting them with lead and sulfur, applying a poultice of dough and lard, or mesmerism, which purported to harness the healing power of the invisible natural forces of all living creatures.

“My friend died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her,” Elizabeth wrote about Mary. “I resolutely tried for weeks to put the idea suggested by my friend away; but it constantly recurred to me.” The more she thought about it, the more plausible the idea became.

Elizabeth had just returned from a disappointing stint teaching at a girls’ school in Kentucky after working many years as a governess and teacher to help her family make ends meet after her father died. These jobs didn’t particularly interest her, but because they were practically the only non-working-class professions available to reasonably educated women, she did them. Her older sister Anna was off teaching in New York accompanied by their younger sister Emily, who was still in school. The family’s new home in the Cincinnati suburbs seemed unusually quiet, giving her plenty of time to think.

Elizabeth dreamed of discovering a “more engrossing pursuit” and felt like a spark without fuel. It was more than fortuitous, then, that Mary implored her to consider a career in medicine at this exact moment. Witnessing her friend dying a needlessly uncomfortable death—exactly because there were no women doctors—proved the jolt Elizabeth needed. She would become a doctor.

In addition to healing sick women like Mary, practicing medicine was attractive to Elizabeth because she believed it would be the perfect field in which to begin to push the boundaries of women’s reach. If other women would join her in becoming a physician, then no woman patient would have to suffer like Mary.

From an early age, Elizabeth believed her intelligence and strength as equal to a man’s. Despite her slight, diminutive frame, she was surprisingly strong. Once, as a young girl in their Bristol home, a gentleman houseguest was regaling Elizabeth and her family with his views on women’s physical inferiority: how even the weakest man could best the strongest woman.

“That is certainly a mistake,” Elizabeth’s brothers protested. “For Elizabeth, when she chooses to give herself the trouble of measuring strength with us, is more than a match for either of us at wrestling or at lifting, and can carry us about with perfect ease.”

“She could not lift me!” the man protested with contemptuous incredulity. “No woman living could lift me against my will. Try it, Elizabeth,” he goaded, sizing up his pint-size competition. “Do your utmost; I defy you to move me out of this chair.” Young Elizabeth slowly crossed the room, then easily hoisted the man up and settled him into her left arm. As he squirmed to free himself, she paraded him around the parlor three times.

“You see,” Elizabeth quipped as she returned him to his chair. “Some women are as strong as some men.” The room erupted in laughter. Elizabeth continued to enjoy wrestling as a diverting hobby into adulthood, often physically tussling with landlords in her spare time.

Her goal with medicine was social change: a place to stick a wedge in and begin the expansion of women’s educational and career opportunities. Elizabeth’s desire to widen women’s sphere and her ideas about how best to accomplish such a goal were heavily influenced by the writings of feminist Margaret Fuller, whose book Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published around the same time as Elizabeth was consoling her ill neighbor.

Fuller served as editor of the transcendentalist magazine The Dial along with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Elizabeth was an avid subscriber. Fuller’s feminism favored a gentler brand of gender equality, one achieved via persuasion and persistence rather than aggression and antagonism. Both Fuller and Blackwell wanted to see women gain more opportunities and influence without taking any away from men. Alienating men, they decided, would do nothing to further their cause.

In fact, Elizabeth didn’t blame men for women’s subordinate social position. She felt women could stand to express a deeper desire to broaden their own horizons and often found her female companions frustratingly interested only in idle gossip. Women were narrow-minded and frivolous, Elizabeth believed, “ignorant of their own capacities.” She thought she could help them realize their full potential.

Her other neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, discouraged Elizabeth’s newfound career plans. Stowe, who would go on to author the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called the idea of a woman becoming a doctor “impracticable.” Elizabeth said Harriet warned her of “the strong prejudice which would exist, which I must either crush or be crushed by.”

Elizabeth was practically giddy at the thought of such universal opposition. She relished the idea that the path she was about to embark upon would be filled with resistance. Such paths were surely noble. “I was severing the usual ties of life and preparing to act against my strongest inclinations,” Elizabeth opined. “But a force stronger than myself then and afterward seemed to lead me on; a purpose was before me which I must inevitably seek to accomplish. Winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.”

An absorbing profession would also help Elizabeth get her mind off of men. Her religious upbringing made her ill at ease about her strong libido. “I had always been extremely susceptible to this influence,” Elizabeth wrote. “From my first adoration, at 7-years-old, of a little boy with rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, I never remember a time when I had not suffered more or less from the common malady—falling in love.”

Becoming a physician, she reasoned, would act as a barrier between her and the expectation of marriage. She was attracted to men, but often found them intellectually disappointing or else found the prospect of sexual contact shameful. Having something to engross her mind, distract her thoughts from wandering to romance, “some object in life which will fill this vacuum” would “prevent this sad wearing away of the heart.” She’d already resigned herself to the possibility that she might never find a worthy partner, and therefore would need to be able to support herself financially.

With her mind made up, Elizabeth began her inquiry into medical schools. Obtaining a degree would be no easy feat. People would diminish her, laugh at her, taunt her, try to stop her. The road ahead would be filled with obstacles of every kind. Her resolve would be tested in ways she never could have imagined.

TWO

Surely, She Is a Joke

No road map existed for what Elizabeth hoped to achieve. At the time, only two or three established American colleges were open to women applicants, and none had a medical school. Many higher education institutions just for women existed, but nearly all held the sole goal of preparing women to be teachers: one of the only acceptable professions for their gender. A few lucky women were also able to support their families with a career in writing, though many used male-sounding pen names. The idea of coeducation of the sexes at universities was starting to take shape in the US, but it was far from the norm. Elizabeth would have to carve out her own lonely path.

Her first obstacle would be a personal one—overcoming her revulsion at the sight of bodily fluids and functions. One of the stereotypes of the time was that women were ill-suited to medicine because they could not handle all of the grotesqueness involved. There must be something wrong with women who wanted to become doctors, so the common wisdom went. Medical education involved dissection and other unpleasant sights, which should surely make any real lady scream or faint. Practicing medicine was decidedly unladylike. To even be interested in medicine was to forsake your femininity.

The Australian Medical Journal supported this belief in 1865. “A woman who dissects, who makes post mortem examinations, who tests urine, who perhaps carries diseased specimens in her dress pocket, who can pass the male catheter, who punctures buboes, probes sinuses, examines purulent discharges, applies ligatures to haemorrhoids, and may have just come from operating for anal fistula, is not a person in whom you would look for the tenderer domestic qualities.”

Elizabeth’s squeamishness may have been a female stereotype, but nevertheless, it was a hurdle that would take a lot of nerve-steeling to overcome. “The struggle with natural repugnance to the medical line of life was so strong that I hesitated to pass the Rubicon and fought many a severe battle with myself on the subject,” Elizabeth said.

But her mind was made up. She wrote to all of the doctors she knew through her family to gather their opinions on her becoming a lady doctor. Elizabeth describes their responses as curiously unanimous. They thought it was a great idea but would be impossible to accomplish.

Before she could even think about applying to medical college, Elizabeth would need money to pay for it. She calculated she would need $3,0002 to cover her living expenses and tuition. Her dream would have to wait a few years while she earned the money.

She took a post teaching music at a school in Asheville, North Carolina. Here, Elizabeth’s medical self-education would begin. A job was a job, but the fact that the school’s principal, Reverend John Dickson, had previously worked as a doctor, likely piqued Elizabeth’s interest in accepting the post. Dickson’s strict religious beliefs meant he didn’t approve of board games, novels, or other frivolous amusements, but what he did approve of was Elizabeth’s medical aspirations. He was more than happy to allow her access to his medical library. So, in her downtime, she studied his volumes on physiology, nutrition, and theories of popular medicine.

When that school shut down for good at the end of the year, Elizabeth went to stay with Reverend Dickson’s younger brother Samuel in Charleston, South Carolina, and took a new post teaching music at the local girls’ boarding school. Samuel was a prominent doctor and professor of medicine with an even bigger library. When she wasn’t teaching, Elizabeth was knee-deep in medical books in Samuel’s library, which included more than one thousand texts. Within a year, she exclaimed, “I really now feel like a medical student.”

Elizabeth insisted nothing could sway her now: “My mind is fully made up. I have not the slightest hesitation on the subject; the thorough study of medicine I am quite resolved to go through with. The horrors and disgusts I have no doubt of vanquishing. I have overcome stronger distastes than any that now remain. As to the opinion of people, I don’t care one straw.”

Now that she’d finally saved up enough money, Elizabeth was ready to begin her studies at a bona fide medical school. Admission to American medical schools didn’t require anything much in the way of advanced educational credentials, and applying was essentially a formality for most men. The subject was basically just another undergraduate career track. Medical schools had only recently begun replacing the system of apprenticeship for learning the practice of medicine, but they caught on quickly. Between 1830 and 1845, the number of medical schools in America more than doubled. Elizabeth could’ve easily found someone to apprentice under, but she wanted to adhere to the educational status quo as tightly as possible. She wanted to earn a legitimate MD and be as highly educated as her modern medical peers.

Elizabeth turned her sights to Philadelphia, the birthplace of medical education in America and currently home to four medical schools. In 1765, the first medical school in North America was established at the College of Philadelphia, later renamed the University of Pennsylvania. Founded by two American men who studied at the University of Edinburgh, the school followed the Scottish system: to graduate required two years of lecture-based courses and one year of clinical instruction in a large hospital setting.

By the start of the 1800s, medical schools had been around for centuries in Europe, but many still taught only theory, while others taught only practice. It was Scotland’s medical schools at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, founded in 1726 and 1751, respectively, that realized the importance of doctors learning both. In addition to accompanying doctors on wards, clinical lectures emerged as an exceptional method of clinical training. Doctors and surgeons would trot sick or injured patients out onto the stage to teach the student audience how to identify symptoms and administer treatments.

Around midcentury, it only took two years to complete a degree at most American medical schools, and your training may or may not have included any practical or clinical experience, depending on the school. In Europe, by contrast, a medical degree took about four years to achieve.

Elizabeth wrote to Philadelphia physician Dr. Joseph Warrington, a devout Quaker, to ask for his advice on medical schools. Warrington was dedicated to providing the city’s poor women the quality maternity care they deserved. In 1828, he founded the Philadelphia Lying-in Charity for Attending Indigent Women in Their Own Home. (Lying-in was a period of extended bed rest after childbirth.) In 1839, he created the Philadelphia Nurse Society which, among other things, provided training in obstetric nursing. Such a champion of women’s health and medical training would surely be supportive of Elizabeth’s plan.

“I confess, my dear lady, that I see many difficulties in the way of attainment,” Warrington replied. He told Elizabeth he had given the matter much reflection—even “personally appealed to some of the most intelligent and liberal-minded ladies of my acquaintance how far the services of a well-educated female physician would be appreciated by them.”

Their response, uniformly, was that no woman would be acceptable to them as a practitioner of medicine. Perhaps these liberal ladies feared the erosion of the status quo, or perhaps they worried no woman could achieve enough education to provide quality medical services. After listening to society constantly trumpet the inferiority of the fairer sex, some women couldn’t help but believe it true. It’s also likely these ladies were wealthy enough to be quite discerning in their choice of physicians. Had Warrington polled the working-class women of the city, he may have gotten a more favorable response to the idea of a lady doctor.

Despite these warnings, Warrington invited Elizabeth to come to Philadelphia. He hoped to convince her that “woman was designed to be the helpmeet for man” and that it was more appropriate for a woman to be the nurse and not the physician; hoping that it would then possibly occur to Elizabeth that her real mission was to fulfill the holy duties of nursing.

While she had nothing against nurses, Elizabeth simply saw no reason why she shouldn’t be allowed to become a doctor. “So revolutionary seemed the attempt of a woman to leave a subordinate position and seek to obtain a complete medical education,” Elizabeth declared.

With what she described as her carefully hoarded earnings, Elizabeth headed to Philadelphia. Here again, she stayed with a former doctor, William Elder, who offered her support and advice. She needed all the encouragement she could get. When she began requesting entrance into Philadelphia’s medical schools in 1847, the reactions were grim.

The first school Elizabeth attempted to gain admittance to was Jefferson College. She called upon Dr. Samuel Jackson, one of the oldest professors in Philadelphia, in person. As she entered his office, a short, gray-haired man glanced up from his newspaper. He was clearly annoyed.

“Well, what is it? What do you want?” he demanded.

“I want to study medicine,” Elizabeth announced.

Jackson began to laugh. “Why?” he asked.

After she detailed her plans, slowly and methodically, his demeanor changed. He began to take her seriously. “There are great difficulties, but I do not know that they are insurmountable,” Jackson admitted. He told her that he would consult with the other medical professors at the college and see what the consensus was as to admitting a female student. “I will let you know on Monday.”

When she returned to his office, Jackson told her he had done his best, but all of the professors were opposed to her entrance. It was a devastating first blow, but Elizabeth did her best to remain optimistic. There were still three more schools to apply to in the city. Next on her list was the Pennsylvania Medical College. That June she visited Professor William Darrach who she would later describe as “the most non-committal man I ever saw. I harangued him, and he sat a full five minutes without a word.”

“Can you give me any encouragement?” she finally demanded of Darrach, tired of waiting in silence.

“The subject is a novel one, madam,” Darrach sputtered at last. “I have nothing to say either for or against it… I cannot express my opinion to you either one way or another.”

“Your opinion, I fear, is unfavorable,” Elizabeth replied dejectedly.

“I did not say so…the way in which my mind acts in this matter I do not feel at liberty to unfold,” William answered.

“Shall I call on the other professors of your college?” countered Elizabeth.

“I cannot take the responsibility of advising you to pursue such a course,” Darrach conceded.

“Can you not grant me admittance to your lectures, as you do not feel unfavorable to my scheme?” she prodded.

“I have said no such thing; whether favorable or unfavorable, I have not expressed any opinion,” Darrach insisted. The professor may have been wholly against her scheme, but too timid to reject such a determined woman in person. He also may have been so taken aback by the proposition of a woman becoming a doctor that he simply needed more time to truly fathom the idea.

Agitated by Darrach’s waffling, Elizabeth got up and left.

Frustrated, but undeterred, Elizabeth went to visit Warrington. In his letters, he may have stressed the difficulty of her chosen path, but he was more encouraging than most of the other medical men she’d encountered in the city. Even someone who was vaguely open to her plans might prove a good ally, or at the very least a sounding board.

Despite his preference that she pursue the less contentious path of nursing, Warrington became a sort of confidant from whom she frequently sought advice. And the more time he spent with her, the less objectionable her idea became. He invited her to use his medical library, visit his patients, and attend his medical lectures.

Elizabeth enjoyed her self-guided study of medical textbooks, but understood its limitations without a teacher to guide her. Not one to sit idly by, she also began studying anatomy at a private school. Upon encountering the inner workings of an actual human body for the first time, it was not revulsion or disgust she felt, but quite the opposite—awe.

“The beauty of the tendons and exquisite arrangement of this part of the body struck my artistic sense,” she beamed after dissecting a human wrist with a calm and curiosity that surprised even her. “I begin to think there is more love of science in me than I have hitherto suspected.” Once given the opportunity to study every subject in school that men did, many women discovered they could in fact be fascinated by and even excel in fields they were told would offend their sensibilities or overwhelm their mental capacities.

Elizabeth continued applying to medical schools, now widening her search beyond Philadelphia. Her private lessons were a stepping-stone to college classes, not a stand-in. Elizabeth was always keenly aware of her trailblazer status, always thinking of what kind of example she would be setting. She feared that taking the private study or apprenticeship route might inspire a fleet of ignorant women into haphazard medical practice after enduring low-quality training. Catastrophizing, perhaps, but Elizabeth was determined to attend a traditional medical college and acquire an MD, both as a sanction for her own course and as a precedent for other women. She wanted nothing to do with the many so-called irregular medical schools that had been popping up nearly as rapidly as traditional ones.

Society’s interest in alternative medicine and untested, trendy wellness cures is far from new. Not everyone agreed in the curative abilities of the harsh treatments favored by regular physicians of the time. Indeed, bloodletting and blistering could easily induce a secondary infection in already-weakened patients. Thanks to ignorance of antiseptics and disease transmission, you might come out of the hospital with more illnesses than you went in with—if you came out at all.

As Western medicine transformed into an educated profession, myriad forms of untested therapies promising the sick more “natural” solutions became fashionable. Such sects included homeopathy, botanical medicine, hydrotherapy, mesmerism, eclecticism, faith healing, and Thomsonianism. The Thomsonian System, developed by self-taught botanist Samuel Thomson, championed herbal purgatives and the warming of the body with steam baths and cayenne peppers. Hydrotherapy “water cures” flushed out toxins with baths, sweating, and wet bandages.

Even if these practitioners offered the same old blue calomel pills, patients often preferred their services. The newly professionalized physicians, also called allopathic physicians, were too self-important, and with little-to-no bedside manner to boot, some patients felt. They allocated less and less time to listen to their patients at appointments. It’s the same grievance that drives many people into the arms of alternative medicine today.

Since medically inclined women were unable to gain entry into traditional medical schools, many chose instead to train and practice in these alternative sects. Harriot Hunt was one such well-known practitioner. At her Boston practice, she treated patients with a healthy mix of herbs, rest, hydrotherapy, and psychotherapy.

Elizabeth refused to be relegated to the medical sidelines, lumped in with the “irregulars.” To create the kind of social change she envisioned and demand the same respect given to male physicians, she needed to be educated as officially and as fully as a traditional male physician.

The possibility of studying in Paris was always in the back of Elizabeth’s mind. It was an idea that many of the doctors and professors she visited brought up because its universities were more welcoming to female students. But one well-known Cincinnati doctor was positively horrified when she suggested she might stay in Paris as a single woman. Warrington echoed this viewpoint.

“You, a young unmarried lady!” Warrington protested. “Go to Paris, that city of fearful immorality, where every feeling will be outraged and insult attend you at every step; where vice is the natural atmosphere and no young man can breathe it without being contaminated! Impossible, you are lost if you go.”

“If the path of duty led me to hell, I would go there,” Elizabeth snapped. “I do not think that by being with devils I should become a devil myself.”

Warrington was so taken aback by this sentiment, all he could do was sit and stare at her in amazement.

In truth, while she knew there was a better chance of achieving her goal in Paris, she didn’t want to take her fight for education to Europe. She thought America was ripe for her social revolution and refused to be forced into traveling to a different continent to earn a medical degree.

Perhaps America wasn’t as ripe as she hoped. Over the months, the disappointments mounted. Rejection after rejection hit, each one stinging a bit more than the last. Her applications to twenty-nine different American medical schools, both large universities and smaller “country” schools, had all been turned down. Soon, every option would be exhausted.

A flat, heavy sadness began to descend upon her. Yet her determination never wavered. “I have tried to look every difficulty steadily in the face,” Elizabeth explained. “I find none which seem to me unconquerable.”

One difficulty Elizabeth experienced was that medical men were scared of the competition female practitioners might present. In a surprisingly frank response to her admission application, the dean of one smaller college wrote back, “You cannot expect us to furnish you with a stick to break our heads with.” All this led Elizabeth to the sad conclusion that medical schools were strongly opposed to a woman entering the profession in any official capacity.

“Elizabeth, it is of no use trying. Thee cannot gain admission to these schools,” Warrington sighed in exasperation. He had a new idea about how to make Paris feasible. “Thee must go to Paris and don masculine attire to gain the necessary knowledge.” He was not the first doctor to suggest Elizabeth disguise herself as a man to earn her degree, but this strategy didn’t fit in with her grand plans, either. She wanted to make a point of being a woman achieving a medical degree, to make a statement about the capabilities of women.

Finally, in late October 1847, she received a letter from Geneva Medical College in western New York state. Upon reading it, she jumped for joy—she was invited to begin her studies there straightaway! The school boasted seven professors and a new building that housed state-of-the-art laboratories, spacious lecture theaters, and a robust specimen collection. It was much better appointed than similar small medical colleges around the country. School terms ran from October to January, so she had only missed the first few weeks of classes.

Unbeknownst to Elizabeth at the time, her admission was unintentional. Warrington had taken it upon himself to write to the school’s professors to entreat them to admit her. His being a prominent Philadelphia physician, the professors didn’t want to offend him, so they opted to let the students decide whether to allow a female student into their ranks. That way when she was surely rejected, it would be the students’ fault, not theirs.

But when it was put to a vote, the students assumed it was a practical joke—the doings of students at a nearby rival school—and they voted unanimously to allow her entry. That a woman would seriously be desiring entry into medical school was surely a joke.

The students would very quickly learn that Elizabeth Black-well was far from a joke.

Elizabeth left for Geneva on November 4, only a couple of weeks after receiving her acceptance letter. A few days later, she trudged through the cold, drizzly weather to meet with the college dean and be inscribed on the role as student 130. At age twenty-six, she was a first-time college student; the first woman medical student in the nation.

After being turned away from several boardinghouses because the other boarders threatened to leave if she was allowed to stay, she had begun to worry she might never find a room. At last, Elizabeth found a comfortable room to stay in on the top floor of a large boardinghouse a mere three minutes down the road from her college. The brief walk took her along the high bank of the town’s scenic Seneca Lake. The room cost $2.503 a week including fuel and lights, but she felt a bit lonesome on the top floor all by herself.

To graduate from Geneva, students were required to attend two sixteen-week terms, submit a thesis, then take an oral exam. Between 1790 and 1820, most states created medical licensure requirements, but essentially, there was nothing in place to prevent anyone from advertising themselves as a healer. To differentiate themselves from all the irregular practitioners and assure their particular allopathic—or science-based—branch of medicine was ensconced in the culture as mainstream, physicians decided they needed national standards.

In 1847—the same year Elizabeth began college—the American Medical Association was born: more than 250 delegates representing forty medical societies and twenty-eight colleges gathered in Philadelphia to define national policies on education and licensing. They decided medical school should be at least six months instead of only four and the curriculum must include anatomy, physiology, pathology, chemistry, therapeutics, surgery, pharmacy, midwifery, diseases of women and children, medical jurisprudence (forensic medicine), materia medica (pharmacology), and theory and practice of medicine.

On Elizabeth’s first day of school, Dean Charles Lee instructed her to wait outside until he introduced her to the class. It was an exciting moment—she was about to attend her first official medical school lecture! Lee stepped into the lecture hall in an unusual state of agitation. The students, alarmed by his mood, worried that he might be about to announce the school’s closure or proclaim some other dreadful news.

“The female student…has arrived,” he said gravely, his voice trembling. The door creaked open and in she walked. “This is Miss Elizabeth Blackwell,” he announced.

A hush fell over the room as all of the students sat and stared in shock. These 129 medical students were typically boisterous—some days you couldn’t even hear the professor’s lecture over their din—but today, their unusual stillness continued throughout the lecture. Elizabeth was the only one who took notes that morning.

The rest of her day was gloomy and busy. The rain poured as she scrambled around the building looking for the right rooms for her four subsequent lectures. She had no textbooks and hadn’t been told where to get them. The anatomy professor was absent that day and the demonstrator, a kind of assistant to the professor, hesitated to allow her to perform a dissection.

After her first day of attending live lectures, Elizabeth exclaimed, “How superior to books! Oh this is the way to learn!” The next day, the anatomy professor, Dr. James Webster, was back. Elizabeth didn’t know what to expect when Dean Lee introduced her to him before class.

“Your plan is a capital one,” Webster declared as he shook Elizabeth’s hand warmly. Webster was a big man with an even bigger personality; a quick wit who didn’t mince his words. After poking fun at the novelty of teaching a female student, he asked, “What branches of medicine have you studied?”

“All but surgery,” Elizabeth replied confidently.

“Well, do you mean to practice surgery?” Dean Lee chimed in.

“Why, of course she does!” Webster interjected on her behalf. “Think of the cases of femoral hernia; only think what a well-educated woman would do in a city like New York! Why, my dear sir, she’d have her hands full in no time, her success would be immense. Yes, yes, you’ll go through the course and get your diploma with great éclat, too. We’ll give you the opportunities. You’ll make a stir, I can tell you.”

Elizabeth beamed. She handed Webster her letter of introduction from Dr. Warrington.

“Stay here in the anteroom while I read it to the students,” he instructed her. She hoped he would remind them of the promise they made when they voted to admit her, that they would be on their best behavior. Webster walked into the amphitheater, and Elizabeth listened at the door as he read aloud the letter. At the end, they erupted in applause.

Such a spirited welcome surprised and pleased Elizabeth. A smile radiated across her face as she entered the lecture hall and sat down quietly. As the delicate surgery demonstration proceeded, she again took studious notes. The only peculiarity Elizabeth noticed that day was that the amphitheater was unusually full, and many of those present were eyeing her with seemingly benign curiosity.

After the lecture, Webster and Dean Lee approached Elizabeth again.

“You attract too much attention, Ms. Blackwell,” Webster laughed. “There was a very large number of strangers present this afternoon. I shall guard against this in the future.”

“Yes,” Dean Lee agreed. “We were saying today that this step might prove quite a good advertisement for the college. If there were no other advantage to be gained, it will attract so much notice. I shall bring the matter into the medical journals. Why, I’ll venture to say in ten years’ time one-third the classes in our colleges will consist of women. After the precedent you will have established, people’s eyes will be opened.”

Reporters’ eyes were definitely popping. Men had come to gawk at the nation’s first woman medical student because news of her admission had already spread to medical journals and newspapers across the country. The Massachusetts Republican provided a concise assessment of Geneva’s newest resident and the wide-reaching press she’d already garnered. Perhaps the reporter was one of the uninvited guests at that very lecture.

“A very notable event was the appearance at the medical lectures of a young woman student named Blackwell. She is a pretty little specimen of the feminine gender. She comes into the class with great composure, takes off her bonnet and puts it under the seat, exposing a fine phrenology. The effect on the class has been good, and great decorum is observed while she is present. The sprightly Baltimore Sun remarked that she should confine her practice, when admitted, to diseases of the heart.”

In a letter to her sister, Elizabeth claimed to be perfectly indifferent to the notice she attracted. “I sit quietly in this large assemblage of young men, and they might be women or mummies for aught I care. I believe the professors don’t exactly know in what species of the human family to place me, and the students are a little bewildered. The other people at first regarded me with suspicion, but I am so quiet and gentle that all suspicion turns to astonishment.”

The small town of Geneva didn’t know what to make of her. As she walked back and forth to college each day, little boys, gentlemen, and ladies alike all stopped to gawk at her. A curious animal indeed.

“Here she comes! Come on; let’s have a good look at the lady doctor!” she heard well-dressed ladies cry as they darted into her path. Elizabeth refused to take any notice of them. Eventually, the novelty of her being an oddity wore off.

While the surprise of the townspeople was hard to miss, Elizabeth remained initially unaware of the more malicious gossip. “I had not the slightest idea of the commotion created by my appearance as a medical student in the little town. Very slowly I perceived that a doctor’s wife at the table avoided any communication with me,” she later admitted. “I afterward found that I had so shocked Geneva propriety that the theory was fully established either that I was a bad woman, whose designs would gradually become evident, or that, being insane, an outbreak of insanity would soon be apparent.”

Elizabeth decided it would be safest if she kept to the school grounds and her boardinghouse. The college became her refuge. “I knew when I shut the great doors behind me that I shut out all unkindly criticism, and I soon felt perfectly at home amongst my fellow students.”

Yet it was only a matter of days before a few of her classmates began pestering her during lectures: a pesky tap on her head from behind, a nasty hiss from across the amphitheater. She shook them off, not giving anyone the satisfaction of her perturbation. During a particularly trying lesson, a folded paper note flew down from the upper seats and landed on her arm as she was taking notes; a conspicuous white flake contrasted against her jet-black sleeve.

“She felt, instinctively, that this note contained some gross impertinence, that every eye in the building was upon her, and if she meant to remain in the College, she must repel the insult, then and there, in such a way as to preclude the occurrence of any similar act,” her sister Anna claimed.

Without so much as raising an eyebrow, Elizabeth continued taking notes, pretending she hadn’t seen the paper. When she finished, she lifted her arm up to ensure everyone in the room could see it, then, keeping her eyes fixed on her notebook, with the slightest flick of the wrist, she dropped the unread missive flat onto the floor. Loud cheers exploded around the hall, with some students hissing their distaste at the perpetrator.

“Her action, at once a protest and an appeal, was perfectly understood by the students,” Anna asserted. She had banked on her quiet manner and utter nonengagement to quickly quell any nonsense. And it worked. Elizabeth had passed the test; the students never bothered her again. Indeed, the students easily acclimated to her presence. Because she was much older than most of them, her classmates began treating her like an older sister.

But her troubles weren’t entirely over. Soon, she was being asked to abstain from attending certain classes when the more delicate subject matter would be covered. When Webster, who was one of her earliest supporters at the school, requested she not come to an anatomy demonstration involving the reproductive system, she decided it was time to put a stop to these requests once and for all. Elizabeth wrote to him requesting he reconsider.

“The study of anatomy is a most serious one, exciting profound reverence,” her note explained. She demanded that she was there as an earnest student, and should be regarded in the same manner as any other student. She conceded, however, that if her classmates desired her to remove herself, she would yield to their wishes. Webster read the note aloud to the class while Elizabeth again waited in the anteroom. She listened as the students responded with hearty approval, then quietly entered and took her seat. Elizabeth would not be asked to sit out any classes again.

Her determination was put to the test during one particular dissection early in the term. While she never alludes to what was being dissected, Elizabeth thoroughly depicts the reactions of the students. Around the room, some blushed, some were hysterical, while others put their heads down and began shaking.

“My delicacy was certainly shocked,” she wrote in her diary. “I had to pinch my hand till the blood nearly came, and call on Christ to help me from smiling, for that would have ruined everything; but I sat in grave indifference.”

The more Elizabeth learned about it, the more beautiful she found human biology. “The wonderful arrangements of the human body excited an interest and admiration which simply obliterated the more superficial feelings of repugnance,” Elizabeth proclaimed as her studies continued. “I passed hour after hour at night alone in the college, tracing out the ramification of parts, until, suddenly struck by the intense stillness around, I found that it was nearly midnight, and the rest of the little town asleep.”

In January, after the end of her first term, Elizabeth headed back to Philadelphia. Sadly, she went empty-handed as none of her professors had provided her with their promised letters of introduction needed for her to secure an apprenticeship in between terms. Perhaps they felt being associated with a woman medical student might be professionally disastrous. She lodged with the Elders again and earned some income by selling a few short stories and teaching private music lessons and set about securing an apprenticeship on her own.

The director of Blockley Almshouse received her most kindly. Blockley was a four-story, two-thousand-patient charitable hospital that cared for Philadelphia’s poorest physically and mentally ill residents. Almshouses were an English tradition carried to America by Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn. As the need for such institutions grew with America’s population, most cities had a poorhouse by the early nineteenth century.

To get her apprenticeship approved, Elizabeth had to convince each of the three political parties on the board of the almshouse to support her. After much lobbying, her petition was put forth at the next board meeting, the vote to admit her was unanimously in favor.

A large room on the third floor in the middle of the women’s syphilitic ward had been prepared for her to stay in while interning. After hearing several curious patients scurrying up and peeking in her door, she arranged her stacks of books and papers on her table so they would line up with the keyhole, obstructing her from view.

The head doctor allowed her entry onto every women’s ward. She was quite taken with his tender bedside manner, describing him as “truthful, energetic, and spirited as he is kind.” In time, the nurses warmed to her. But as for the young resident physicians, when Elizabeth walked onto the wards, they walked out.

To these newly graduated men, a woman who dared to muscle onto their hard-earned turf was insulting, her motives suspect. What if she caught them making a mistake? They hindered her study by ceasing to write the patient’s diagnosis, treatment plan, and case notes on the card at the head of the bed. To avoid confrontation, she studied in her room until they finished their rounds, when she could wander the wards unimpeded. This lack of cooperation left Elizabeth frustrated. She could have learned so much more if only they hadn’t avoided her.

The experience was a crash course in observing suffering, mental illness, and the human condition for Elizabeth. She learned more about treating patients than she could have in a decade of college classes. Her older sister Anna had explained to her that sex wasn’t only confined to a marriage bed, but nothing could prepare her for what she witnessed at Blockley. For the first time, Elizabeth encountered the everyday ravages of poverty and male licentiousness: sex workers devastated by STDs, servants impregnated by their employers, and other victims of rape and incest, some pregnant and many still children themselves.

“I see frequently many painful sights. Within one week, a lunatic scalded himself to death, one woman cut her throat, another fell down a cellar opening and broke both legs, they died the following day, another jumped over the bannisters, breaking both ankles,” she revealed.

“Last night, just as I had got to sleep, I was roused by running and screaming in the gallery. I jumped out of bed, ran to my window and looked out. There in the moat that surrounded the building, a depth that made me dizzy, lay a white heap covered in blood uttering a terrible sound half groan, half snort. It was a woman who had been confined in the room next to mine and had jumped out of the third story window,” Elizabeth described. “There she lay in the moonlight in agony while lamps held out of the windows by pale, half-dressed forms threw a strange glare upon the terrible sight.”

Overall, she declared her time at Blockley painful, both in body and mind. Once her eyes had been opened to the suffering and social inequity in the world, there was no closing them.

Elizabeth continued to maintain a surprisingly low opinion of women. Between men and women, there would always be an intellectual difference, she told her little sister Emily. Of the early feminists who gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, that summer—just ten miles east of Geneva—to rally support for women’s education and suffrage, she was less than supportive.

In October, Elizabeth returned to Geneva. The townspeople seemed to take less and less notice of her. If she’d had more time for socializing, she might have even been able to make friends with them. As it was, classes and studying occupied most of Elizabeth’s waking hours. She had to make do with her interactions with professors and fellow students. “The outside world made little impression on me.”

She continued to be an attentive, dedicated student. Her notes from one of Dr. Lee’s materia medica lectures show how studious she was and give us a glimpse into what medical students were learning at the time.

When it came to women, the teachings were that their sensitive nervous systems required “the same precaution necessary as in infancy. A delicate woman should not be dosed like an Irishman.” Physicians should always inquire as to the presence of menstruation, Lee explained, during which time a woman’s nervous system is continually excited. Powerful remedies should be avoided during menstruation, menopause, and pregnancy, otherwise hysteria or miscarriage could result. It was good to be cautious about medication use during pregnancy, but surely many women might have appreciated a healthy dose of pain relievers to combat cramps during menstruation.

Before long, Elizabeth found herself sitting for the arduous final exams. “My face burned, my whole being was excited,” Elizabeth exclaimed after it was over. Moreover, “a great load was lifted from my mind.” Soon she could reap the rewards of all of the time she’d dedicated to arduous study, revision, and classwork, of the sacrifice of eschewing any semblance of a social life.

The week before graduation, her little brother Henry came up to be by her side. He had traveled through terrible blizzards to be there with her on her special day.

“I found E. in good spirits, as you may suppose,” Henry wrote home. On Monday morning, Henry accompanied Elizabeth to the college, where she underwent a second examination along with the other members of the graduating class. The students welcomed him most warmly. Their intelligence and hospitality impressed him. During the exam, the other students sat by the stove chatting with Henry.

“Well, boys, our Elib feels first-rate this morning. Do you notice how pleased she looks?” one student commented.

“Yes, indeed,” another agreed. “And I think she well may after the examination she passed yesterday.”

“So Lizzie will get her diploma after all!” a third exclaimed. Then they all agreed that “our Elib” was “a great girl.” Henry quickly realized his sister had become a universal favorite of professors and students alike.

“Our Sis came off with flying colours and the reputation of being altogether the leader of the class,” Henry raved to his family.