London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
Today’s story begins with a young woman walking into a medical school in America and causing the entire student body to collapse into helpless laughter.
Because they thought she was a joke.
That was the point.
The faculty had put her application to the students certain they’d reject it.
No respectable medical school in the 1840s was going to admit a woman. Impossible. Absurd. Ridiculous.
But the boys thought it would be funny.
So they voted yes.
Unanimously.
Excellent prank, lads.
Except the prank walked through the front door, sat down, did the work, outperformed them all, graduated above all 150 male students and changed the history of medicine.
Her name was Elizabeth Blackwell.
And there’s a lovely London angle to all this because although she became America’s first woman doctor, the story loops gloriously back to London. To St Bartholomew’s Hospital. To Marylebone. To the London School of Medicine for Women. To the great Victorian struggle over who gets to belong in public life.
And, yes, to women in medicine.
A subject very close to our own London Walks world.
We’ve got not one but two women guides who are doctors. Luisa and Dr Ann. Women who move through London carrying serious professional expertise lightly. Which, when you think about it, is part of the Elizabeth Blackwell legacy.
Because when Blackwell came along, women doctors were practically science fiction.
Or worse.
Suspicious.
Improper.
Unfeminine.
The phrase “female physician” in those days often meant something distinctly dodgy. Quackery. Abortionists. Backstreet practitioners.
Elizabeth Blackwell wanted to change that.
She was born in Bristol in 1821 into a large, energetic, reform-minded family. Her father was a sugar refiner, anti-slavery campaigner and believer in educating girls properly. Radical notions, some of them.
Then came financial trouble. Riots in Bristol. Emigration to America.
Picture it.
The Blackwells crossing the Atlantic in the age of sail. The eleven-year-old Elizabeth heading into this roaring, expanding, turbulent America of abolitionism, frontier ambition and astonishing inequality.
And then catastrophe.
Her father dies suddenly in Cincinnati, leaving the family nearly penniless.
So the daughters work.
Teach.
Scrape.
Manage.
Survive.
Elizabeth hated teaching. Hated it. But it was one of the very few respectable ways a woman could earn money.
Then sometime in the mid-1840s came the moment.
A female acquaintance dying of uterine cancer supposedly tells her she’d delayed treatment because she dreaded examination by a male doctor.
And Blackwell suddenly sees the gap.
Women need women doctors.
Simple idea.
Revolutionary consequences.
So she applies to medical schools.
Rejected.
Rejected.
Rejected.
Again and again and again.
Some schools are horrified.
Some amused.
Some suggest she disguise herself as a man.
She refuses.
Others tell her to go to Paris and train as a midwife because that’s more “appropriate.”
She refuses that as well.
And finally we get the glorious comic absurdity of Geneva Medical College in upstate New York.
The faculty toss her application to the students as a joke.
The students think approving her would be hilarious.
And thus history changes because a group of young men decide to be clever.
There’s a lesson there somewhere.
Blackwell arrives.
The atmosphere freezes solid.
Professors avoid looking at her.
Patients object to her presence.
Male students reportedly behave as if some dangerous exotic animal has wandered into the anatomy theatre.
And she just keeps going.
Coolly.
Relentlessly.
One imagines a fair amount of teeth-gritting.
In January 1849 she graduates top of the pile.
America’s first woman MD.
Huge newspaper coverage follows on both sides of the Atlantic.
And then she comes to Europe.
Paris first.
Not as a doctor, because Paris hospitals won’t admit her as one, but as a student midwife at La Maternité.
Then disaster strikes.
A baby with a severe eye infection squirts infected matter into her eye during treatment.
Within days the eye is ruined.
Just think about that.
After all that struggle. All those closed doors. And now the dream of becoming a surgeon vanishes because of a workplace infection.
Victorian medicine could be unbelievably dangerous. Hospitals often killed people almost as enthusiastically as diseases did.
Which brings us to London.
Blackwell arrives here in 1849 and suddenly London society goes slightly mad for her.
A woman doctor!
The newspapers love it.
Progressive circles love it.
The early women’s movement especially loves it.
And St Bartholomew’s Hospital – Barts – admits her to the wards.
Not all the wards, mind you. Heaven forfend. Certain barriers remained firmly in place.
But still. Extraordinary progress.
Imagine her walking through Smithfield.
Past the meat market.
Past the carts and mud and noise and blood.
Into Barts.
A place that had already been healing Londoners for seven centuries.
And here comes Elizabeth Blackwell stepping into the old medieval institution like a herald from the future.
Then back to America she goes.
Private practice.
A dispensary for poor women and children.
Then the New York Infirmary for Women.
And here’s the really important thing: she doesn’t just want to be a doctor herself. She wants structures. Institutions. Openings for other women.
That’s always the mark of the genuine pioneer.
Not “look at me.”
More “hold the door open behind you.”
Her younger sister Emily joins her. Other women follow.
And eventually Blackwell circles back to Britain once more.
Now the London story becomes central.
Because in 1859 she manages to get onto the British medical register through a legal technicality in the Medical Act.
The only woman there.
The lone female name.
Imagine the atmosphere in those rooms.
The coughs.
The raised eyebrows.
The muttering.
Then she starts lecturing in London.
And sitting in those audiences is a young woman named Elizabeth Garrett.
Later Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
Another titan.
Another barrier-breaker.
Inspired in part by Blackwell’s example.
One woman lighting the next torch.
That’s how history often works.
By the 1870s Blackwell is deeply woven into London reform circles.
Marylebone.
The New Hospital for Women.
The London School of Medicine for Women.
Public health campaigns.
Sanitation.
Hygiene.
“Prevention is better than cure.”
Which, incidentally, sounds startlingly modern until you remember Victorian London smelled like an open sewer for much of the nineteenth century.
Blackwell believed medicine should be moral as well as scientific. Sometimes wonderfully perceptive. Sometimes maddeningly wrong.
She opposed vivisection. Distrusted germ theory. Distrusted aggressive surgery.
And here’s where she becomes really interesting.
Because pioneers are rarely simple.
The younger women doctors increasingly disagreed with her. The profession was moving toward laboratory science, surgery, bacteriology, modernity.
Blackwell often found herself standing slightly apart from the future she herself had helped create.
Which feels oddly human.
You break open the door but don’t entirely like what comes through it.
Still, by then the revolution was unstoppable.
Women doctors were no longer a joke.
No longer an absurdity.
No longer a prank vote.
Elizabeth Blackwell died on May 31st, 1910.
And if you stand today outside Barts or walk through Marylebone or pass the old sites connected with the London School of Medicine for Women, it’s worth remembering that not so very long ago the entire idea of a woman physician seemed laughable to much of society.
Until one woman walked into the room and quietly refused to leave.
And there you have it London Walkers, that’s your daily fix for today.
See you tomorrow.