A visit to Geneva from her brother Howard provided a small dose of Blackwellian comfort. Elizabeth skipped lectures to enjoy his company. “I did more laughing than I’ve done for months,” she wrote. “His visit did me real good, for I have been so lonely.” But the reunion marked a more permanent parting—Howard had come to say farewell before seeking his fortune with the Blackwell cousins in Birmingham. And Anna, who had a special maternal fondness for Howard, and had been pining for her mother country since the day the Blackwells left Bristol, would return with him. Anna had found an outlet for her fascination with radical ideas in translating the work of the cross-dressing novelist George Sand and the Blackwells’ beloved Charles Fourier, progenitor of Associationism. Once abroad, she would also serve as a correspondent for American magazines, reporting on manners and mores in England and France. Neither Anna nor Howard would live in the United States again.
Elizabeth felt intensely the pressure of her task: just a couple of months until her final examinations, and beyond that, a future consecrated to “the accomplishment of a great idea.” Alone in her room, she practiced lecturing to an audience of her bed, desk, and washstand, frustrated by her inability to translate the fire in her mind into words. “I would I were not so exclusively a doer,” she wrote. “Speech seems essential to the reformer, but mine is at present a very stammering, childish utterance.” In December a heavy snowfall made even the few steps between her room and the college treacherous; upon reaching the lecture hall chilled and breathless, she was warmed to the core by the attentions of her classmates. One brought her a chair, several made small talk about the extreme weather, Dr. Webster arrived with his usual jovial energy—everyday pleasures, but to Elizabeth, nothing to be taken for granted. “How little they know my sensitiveness to these trifling tokens!”
Her brother Henry thrilled Elizabeth with the promise of a Christmas visit. Christmas was the high holiday of Blackwell family solidarity, and the compilation of the literary Christmas Annual continued even as their diaspora widened. It had been years since Elizabeth shared Christmas with another Blackwell, and she was especially eager to see Henry, who had been making alarming noises about decamping to California, where the scramble for gold was just beginning—a commodity even riskier than sugar. “Believe me, brother mine,” she had written sternly, “nothing lasting, nothing that will mark the Age enduringly, can be accomplished without a persevering effort, that is proof against temptation, & undazzled & unblended by the brilliant bursting meteors, which are accidents not elements of strong life.” Just a month from the diploma that she had trudged through so many years to attain, the thought of her own brother galloping after a get-rich-quick scheme was mortifying. The family, equally concerned, had dispatched cousin Kenyon to New York to talk some sense into Henry.
On Christmas Day, Elizabeth garlanded her walls with hemlock boughs and stuck candles into four turnips, heaping more evergreens around her improvised centerpiece. She laid in a supply of almonds and raisins, “told everybody my brother was coming, & then sat down, dressed in best bib & tucker, to await his arrival.” But when the knock sounded, at her door stood not Henry but generous Kenyon. Not relishing a Christmas scolding, Henry had decided to stay in New York.
Elizabeth spent New Year’s alone, listening to the sleigh bells and shouts of greeting as Geneva’s wealthier residents paid their New Year’s calls among its trim brick row houses and grand Greek Revival homes. Lacking social or financial capital, she took comfort in her own abilities. In her journal she recorded a postoperative visit to a “pretty blind girl” recovering alone, whose “simple heart and idle fancy” Elizabeth found appealing. “Such are the women I long to surround with my stronger arm,” she wrote. She paid a house call to a flu-stricken family outside town and stayed two days amid “a constant concert of coughing.” Upon her return, she too fell sick. She prescribed herself sleep, baths, and walks in the cold. “I was amused & gratified,” she wrote, “to see how my body threw off the influenza to which it was exposed.” Having questioned the fruitless remedies in the materia medica—“the very thought of the drugs disgusts me”—she was heartened to see her hunch play out successfully. A month shy of becoming a qualified physician, it appeared she had doctored herself with nothing stronger than water and fresh air.
“I have the strengthening conviction that my aim is right, & that I too am working after my little fashion, for the redemption of mankind,” she wrote. “I have a most perfect conviction, that holy influence surrounds me. I know that I am one of the Elect.” Her mother, passionate devotee of Presbyterian revivalism, would have embraced this echo of Calvin in the words of her skeptical daughter. But although Elizabeth’s soul might be in peril, her self-esteem was fine. Though she was careful to modulate her tone in public, in letters home her faith in her own righteousness could be breathtaking.
Elizabeth finished her final examinations at the top of the class. Though the outcome was no surprise to her—“the examinations were slight as they always are & in no case would the Faculty have rejected me”—her own sense of relief was. She left the examination room with her face aflame and her nerves singing, and was greeted with warm applause by the students still waiting their turn. “They all seem to like me,” she wrote, “and I believe I shall receive my degree with their united approval; a generous and chivalric feeling having conquered the little feelings of jealousy.” The respect of this group of male peers was a laurel wreath. “I often feel when I am with them how beautiful the relations of man and woman might be under a truer development of character, in nobler circumstances.”
On January 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell received her diploma from Geneva Medical College. The day was full of sunshine, lake and sky competing for bluest blue, and all of Geneva was trying to get a glimpse of the unprecedented event. An hour before the commencement exercises, the best seats in the First Presbyterian Church on Pultney Square were already taken—by the very townswomen who had been horrified at Elizabeth’s arrival. “Nothing but a vast expanse of woman’s bonnets and curious eyes,” wrote twenty-five-year-old Margaret DeLancey, daughter of the local bishop, eager to glimpse “the Lioness of the day.”
At half past ten, Elizabeth left for the church, dressed in black silk brocade trimmed with white lace, swathed in a fringed cape, and conspicuously hatless, the spectators noted, though this had more to do with Elizabeth’s limited budget for new millinery than anything else. The dress itself was an unavoidable extravagance, but “I can neither disgrace womankind, the College, nor the Blackwells, by presenting myself in a shabby gown,” she insisted. By her side walked Henry, successfully dissuaded from his California dreams and currently honoring his late father’s paradoxical ambitions by pursuing an education in the New York sugar trade. Come to visit her at last, he had bought a new handkerchief and cravat and borrowed a cloth cloak from a friend “for the purpose of striking terror & admiration into all beholders.”
Henry had arrived in time to cheer Elizabeth through her examinations and had entertained himself by sitting near the stove at the medical building, listening with amused pride to the chatter of students unaware of who he was.
“Well boys,” one remarked, “our Elib feels first-rate this morning. Do you notice how pleased she looks?”
“Yes indeed,” answered another, “and I think she well may after the examination she passed yesterday.”
“So Lizzie will get her diploma after all,” said a third. “If any member of the class gets one, she is sure of it.”
The pageantry of the day gave Elizabeth the opportunity both to demonstrate her unimpeachable modesty and to satisfy the ego that lay just beneath it. Accompanied by the faculty and Bishop William DeLancey, the students walked the short distance around the square from the medical building to the columned portico of the church in grand procession. Dr. Webster—gleeful both at Elizabeth’s success and at the commotion it was causing—had sent more than one message inviting her to join the parade, but she had demurred. He
intercepted her on the church steps and begged her to change her mind.
Pausing in her ascent, Elizabeth turned to him with eyebrows raised. “It wouldn’t be ladylike,” she told him, in a tone that left no room for argument.
“Wouldn’t it indeed?” exclaimed the doctor, his smile slipping. “Why, no, I forgot—I suppose it wouldn’t.”
Elizabeth and Henry took their seats in a side pew. The rest of the class filed into the rows front and center, their coats a dark island in a sea of color, as the rustle of whispers and crinolines rose from an audience composed largely of women. After an interlude of choral music and prayer, Geneva’s president, Benjamin Hale, conferred the diplomas. Calling up the graduates four at a time and addressing them briefly in Latin—the solemn effect marred by repeated glances downward to remember his lines—he doffed his velvet cap but remained seated as he handed over the sheepskins to the bowing young men. Elizabeth, last to be called, approached the altar alone, a bit of choreography that was meant to underline her propriety but had the happy side effect of highlighting her individual achievement. In comporting herself with such elaborate decorum, she managed to attract the undivided attention of every member of her audience.
This time President Hale rose to his feet. For each quartet of graduates, he had intoned the same formula of address: “Domine Doctor . . .” Now, for the first time, he began with “Domina.” Placing the precious diploma in Elizabeth’s hands, Hale bowed, and she bowed in return. “A silence deep as death pervaded the assembly,” wrote an overexcited reporter from the Geneva Gazette. “Her bosom heaved, almost too full for utterance.” But this was not a romance, and she was not heaving, simply drawing breath for a characteristically measured response. “Sir, I thank you,” she began. “By the help of the Most High, it shall be the effort of my life to shed honor upon this* diploma.” She bowed once more and descended, her self-possession betrayed only by the rising color in her cheeks as the assembly applauded and Dr. Webster rubbed his hands together and beamed. As Elizabeth reached the last step, her friend George Field stood and beckoned her into the first pew. The row of graduates shifted over to make room, and she took her place with them for the rest of the program, “feeling more thoroughly at home in the midst of these true-hearted young men,” she wrote, “than anywhere else in the town.”
She had ample time to slow her drumming pulse during Dr. Lee’s lengthy valedictory address. Lee congratulated his students on the first step of their journey. “You have learned how to learn, and what to learn—how to observe, and what to observe,” he declared; now the work of actually learning and observing could begin. He roamed in his remarks from the heights of the Hippocratic Oath to the mundanities of daily doctoring: don’t pad your bill with unnecessary house calls; don’t offer a pessimistic prognosis in order to burnish your reputation with a miracle cure; don’t degrade your good name with crack-brained therapies and patent medicines; don’t drink. “It has been said that the surgeon should have an eagle’s eye, a lion’s heart and a lady’s hand; but none of these can he have, who habitually indulges in the intoxicating cup,” Lee instructed. None of the newly minted physicians before him, even if possessed of eagle eyes and lion hearts, could check off as many of these ideal qualities as the teetotaling woman in the front row.
Lee’s respect for female fine-motor skills, however, exceeded his regard for the gender in general. To his mind, credulous women “who would be better employed in their domestic duties” were largely to blame for the success of quacks, against whose schemes the scientific young men of Geneva Medical College were now mobilized. The era of “witches and impostors,” Lee announced, was drawing to a close.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, was a disciplined and persevering hero, a “ministering angel” armed with science, clearly not a witch. She was, however, an exception. “Such cases must ever be too few to disturb the existing relations of society,” he concluded, “or excite any other feeling on our part than admiration.” To men like Lee, Elizabeth was a comet, a single brief streak of light across the sky: impressive, but leaving the eternal order of the stars unchanged.
Up in the gallery, young Margaret DeLancey, the bishop’s daughter, joined the applause, thoroughly satisfied with her day’s entertainment. And just think! Dr. Lee himself had said Dr. Blackwell “would have more practice than she could attend to—that he would insure her six thousand dollars the first year!! Nearly as good as going to California, is it not?” Which, in the year that gave the prospecting forty-niners of the gold rush their nickname, was saying something.
As the audience dispersed, Bishop DeLancey, himself a trustee of the college, was among those who came to congratulate Elizabeth, “to the great astonishment of the conservatives,” wrote Henry with amusement. The vestibule of the church was crowded with women hoping for a closer look at the “lioness.” As Elizabeth approached on Henry’s arm, they parted to make way, still staring, but most with tentative smiles instead of the scowls she had faced upon her first arrival. “I was glad of the sudden conversion thus shown,” Elizabeth wrote, “but my past experience had given me a useful and permanent lesson . . . as to the very shallow nature of popularity.”
Within the Blackwell tribe, Elizabeth’s graduation was hailed with fierce approbation. “Beloved Relations,” wrote hyperbolic Henry. “The important crisis is past, the great occasion over, the object of so much and so justifiable anticipation has been attained, and proud as I always feel of the Blackwells, my familism never seemed to me so reasonable and so perfectly a matter of course as it did this morning.” In Cincinnati, brother Sam awaited the news with characteristic earnestness: “God be with our dear & noble sister! He has made her what she is & enabled her to accomplish so far, the will He has wrought in her; & precious in His sight will she be, in all her ways.” The most incisive endorsement came from Marian, whose mild manner belied a clear eye and a keen sense of irony. Elizabeth “has thousands of warm friends,” she wrote, “especially now that her exertions have been crowned with success,” and in spite of the grumbling physicians who continued to insist that medicine was the privilege of men. “The good sense of the community is beginning to wake up to the barbarousness of the custom of permitting men to attend on women during sickness,” she continued, her own fragile health making her all too familiar with an invalid’s indignities. “And in this way as in everything else if women begin to desire it they will end by carrying their point & having it their own way.”
Hannah Blackwell’s pride in her third daughter’s achievement was tinged with baffled concern. In the decade since her husband’s death, she had ceded the family’s affairs to her grown children, narrowing her focus to home and God. Elizabeth had ventured far beyond anything her mother could fathom. “I trust her life will be a very useful one. She has very exalted ideas of the profession,” Hannah allowed. “But oh what a life of labor it will be.” She wrote Elizabeth long querulous letters full of concern for the state of her soul—between medicine and Associationism, what would become of it? Elizabeth thanked her for her “affection & sympathy in my eccentric course” and tried to reassure her. “You urge upon me the importance of religion—why bless the dear Mother what am I doing else but living religion all the time?” she insisted. “Do you think I care about Medicine—nay verily—it’s just to kill the Devil, whom I hate so heartily.”
Outside the family, Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., received a more ambivalent reaction. Her thesis on ship fever was published in the Buffalo Medical Journal—“partly to give a little notoriety to the College, partly to be an introduction to me abroad,” Elizabeth wrote. “I disliked the notoriety of the thing, as the thesis is quite an ordinary student’s composition,” she continued, “but they said it would do me credit, & pressed the matter, so I complied.” “They” were presumably her professors Charles Lee and Austin Flint, who gave Elizabeth’s work pride of place as the first item in the issue.
Her thesis, as printed, announced not just Elizabeth’s competence as a s
cientific observer of epidemic typhus but also her broader vision for humanity. “When the laws of health are generally understood and practiced,” she concluded in ringing tones, “when a social providence is extended over all ranks of the community, and the different nations of the earth interlinked in true brotherhood—then we may hope to see these physical evils disappear, with all the moral evils which correspond to, and are constantly associated with them.” In an era before germ theory, upright behavior seemed at least as viable a pathway toward physical health as anything else. Elizabeth would never let go of this early conviction.
The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal reprinted a “glowing account” of the graduation ceremony and added its own gratifying comment on “Ship Fever”: “Its literary merits are above the average of such productions, and it manifests persevering and praiseworthy research.” This recognition, and the decidedly unfeminine confidence of Elizabeth’s voice in an established medical journal, proved too much for some. A writer signing himself D.K. (a pun on Dike, classical goddess of moral order) sent a blistering letter to the editor condemning the recent commencement—“or what might more properly be called the farce, enacted at the Geneva Medical College”—that seemed to herald “the nefarious process of amalgamation.”
Amalgamation was a loaded word, lifted from metallurgy to denote the mixing of races rather than alloys. The issue at hand was coeducation, not miscegenation, but D.K. saw Elizabeth’s trespass as equally taboo. A woman who dared to penetrate the medical lecture hall surely “perverts the laws of her Maker.” How could the grace and virtue of womanhood possibly be compatible with the rougher realities of the world of men? “The distaff, the needle and the pencil look better in her hand than the hoe or the scythe, the trephine or the gorget,”† wrote D.K. “If a clique of pseudo-reformers, or some mushroom Thomsonian or hydropathic association, had conferred this degree, it would have been a matter of no surprise, because it would be in perfect keeping with their transactions.” And with that parting shot, he neatly and inadvertently vindicated Elizabeth’s insistence on a degree from a regular medical school.
The Doctors Blackwell Page 9