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An Appeal in Behalf of the Medical Education of Women.
New York, 1856. 8vo (8.875” x 5.75”), original wrappers. 16 pp. Early ownership inscription in ink at front wrapper: “John Hanford.” Stamps of the Library of the Medical Society of the County of Kings [New York] at front wrapper & title p., printed library slip filled out in ink at top left of title p., partially obscuring “Appeal.” CONDITION: Good, chip and light soiling to left margin of front wrapper, spine mostly perished. A pamphlet outlining the necessity and promise of women’s medical education, describing the barriers faced by female medical students, and appealing for support of a proposed teaching hospital for women doctors and nurses. This pamphlet makes the case for the expansion of Elizabeth Blackwell’s “New York Infirmary and Dispensary for women and children” into a proper “woman’s hospital”: All classes of non infectious disease will be admitted, and there will be very full provision made for midwifery and the diseases of women, branches in which, from their very nature, it is particularly difficult for women as students in general hospitals to obtain satisfactory instruction, although they form necessarily so large a part of their practice, and in which, among the poor, the aid of educated women physicians would be so valuable. The benefits of such a hospital would be manifold: it would serve the medical needs of the rapidly-increasing population of New York City (immigration statistics from the last five years are provided), enable poor and sometimes “vicious” women to benefit from the care and moral influence of female doctors and nurses; and, of course, provide those doctors and nurses the thorough medical training barred to them by the prevailing misogyny of medical schools. These barriers of sexism are described early in the volume, with a thoroughness probably borne of personal experience, and encompass everything from the cruel loss of toleration by male professors who, initially supportive, had been convinced by male peers to shun their female students, to the simple inability to observe medical demonstrations behind a jostling crowd of taller bodies. The final pages outline the funding needs and plan for the woman’s hospital and list the executive committee and “friends of the Institution,” including Blackwell and her sister Emily (also a doctor); Stacy B. Collins, president (a Quaker and the first private individual to engage Blackwell as his family physician); a number of women (including doctors); and several prominent men, among them Horace Greeley and Horace Mann. Brief biographies of the three female doctors on the executive committee (the Blackwell sisters and Maria E. Zakrzewska), and medical endorsements conclude the volume. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) was born in Bristol, England, to a large, reform-minded family, and immigrated to America when her father’s sugar-refining business collapsed. As a young woman, Blackwell taught school and studied medicine privately in Charleston and Philadelphia before being urged by her progressive friends (many of them Quakers) to break the gender barrier in medicine. She graduated at the top of her class from Geneva Medical College in New York State in 1849—becoming the first woman to receive a medical degree in the U.S.—and the school promptly shut its doors to women, sparking a debate on female physicians in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (now the New England Journal of Medicine). Blackwell herself pursued postgraduate education in Paris and London (where she befriended Florence Nightingale) before returning to the U.S. in 1851. Still shunned by the medical establishment, Blackwell founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, in which venture she was soon joined by her sister, who had managed to gain a medical degree, and Dr. Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska. The hospital—now Beekman Downtown Hospital—became a success, and the Blackwells ran a women’s medical college from 1868 until 1899, when Emily Blackwell felt confident the students would receive equal training at Cornell, and arranged for their transfer. Blackwell died in 1910, three years after a disabling fall in Kilmun, Scotland. A pamphlet making the case for the education of female doctors, in the form of a teaching hospital run by pioneering female physician and educator Elizabeth Blackwell. REFERENCES: Blackwell, Elizabeth. Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women : Autobiographical Sketches by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (London and New York, 1895), p. 194.
Item #10200
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