Elizabeth Blackwell was born on February 3, 1821 in Bristol England. She was the third child out of nine children. Her father Samuel Blackwell owned a sugar refinery that he and his wife worked in. Mr. Blackwell afforded to give his numerous sons, and daughters an education. Samuel Blackwell believed that his daughters should get the same education as his sons so he had his daughters tutored by the house servants. When Elizabeth was eleven her father's sugar refinery burned down so the family immigrated to the United States, and set up a refinery in New York City. The Blackwells were very religious Quakers. They believed that all men and women were equal in the eyes of God. Due to their Quaker beliefs, the Blackwell family was anti-slavery. An opportunity was presented to Mr. Blackwell that allowed him to open a refinery in Ohio, where slaves wouldn't be needed to harvest sugar. So the family moved to Cincinnati. Three months after they moved Samuel got very sick with biliary fever and died. After Elizabeth's father died she began teaching in Kentucky to make money to pay for medical school. She became active in the anti-slavery moment (as did her brother Henry Brown Blackwell who married Lucy Stone a suffragette).
In 1845 she went to North Carolina where she read medicine with Dr. John Dickson. Afterwards she also read with his brother Dr. Sameul Henry Dickson in Charleston, South Carolina.
Elizabeth Blackwell attended Geneva Colledge in New York. She was accepted there but, most students didn't want a female there. After a while Elizabeth discovered it was all a joke, but that didn't get her down, because she knew that she could become a doctor and no one could stop her!
Banned from practice in most hospitals she was advised to go to Paris, France to train at La Maternité, but while she was there her training was cut short because she caught a terrible eye infection, (purulent opthalmia), from a baby she was treating. She had her eye removed and replaced with a glass eye. On January 11, 1849 she became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.
In 1857 Elizabeth along with her sister Emily and Dr. Marie Zarkrzewska, founded their own infirmary, named the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. During the Revolutionary War, Elizabeth trained many women to be nurses and sent them to the Union Army. After the war,in 1868 Elizabeth had time to establish a Women's Medical College at the Infirmary to train women, physicians, and doctors. In 1869 she left her sister Emily in charge of the College and returned to England. Florence Nightingale, she opened a Women's Medical College. Blackwell taught at London School of Medicine for Woman and accepted a chair in Gynecology. She was also the first female physician and doctor in the UK Medical Register. Then she retired a year later.During Elizabeth's retirement she had adopted a daughter (an Irish immigrant) from an orphan asylum on Randall's Island named Katherine Barry. Elizabeth had called her Kitty. She was eight years old when she was first adopted and stayed with Elizabeth for the rest of her life.
