While Emily steeped herself in science, the rest of Cincinnati was afire with spiritualism, thanks to a visit from the touring Fox sisters, Margaretta and Catherine, of Rochester, New York. In the past year these celebrated teenagers had dazzled audiences with sensational public séances, during which mysterious rappings seemed to communicate messages from the spirit world. Henry had gone with his friends from the new Literary Club of Cincinnati, and one afternoon he sat discussing the phenomenon with one of them, Henry Warriner, in a voice loud enough to draw Emily away from her books. Warriner himself, it turned out, professed clairvoyant skill in divining people’s characters by touching their writing.
Scientist or not, Emily could not resist this chance to peer into the future. She fetched a letter penned by Elizabeth and one she had written herself. Holding Elizabeth’s to his forehead, Warriner focused his attention for several silent minutes. “If I get anything from this letter,” he began, “the writer is a very superior person—there is an intense thirst for knowledge.” He followed this generic opening with a string of words that did indeed seem to frame Elizabeth’s unique force: enthusiasm, aspiration, perseverance, determination, ardor, ideality, “a great sweep and breadth of thought.” Emily was riveted in spite of herself.
“I perceive great mental action,” Warriner continued. “If it be a lady there is much more vigour and power than they generally possess.”
“Do you perceive much benevolence?” asked Emily. Would her distant sister become the friend she craved?
“There is sincerity . . . directness . . . ,” Warriner mused. “Benevolence does not strike me as prominent.”
It was disappointing but not particularly surprising. “Do you perceive much ambition?” Emily wanted to know.
“There is no petty ambition but a high aspiration,” came the reply, too close to the mark to dismiss. “There is great energy and firmness—a powerful will—it is a good nature—there is a good humor in it.” That, at least, was heartening.
Taking up Emily’s letter—unfortunately less substantial than Elizabeth’s, but the only one Emily had to hand—Warriner meditated even longer than before.
“I perceive great intellectual activity,” he said at last—again, a safe bet in the Blackwell household. But there was more. “There is something very luminous and lucid in the mind,” he went on. “It is a less glorious, less glowing character—I do not see the same sweep of thought—there is more keenness and penetration.”
“Which would succeed best practically,” asked Henry, with a reassuring twinkle at Emily, “this individual or the last?”
“This one,” answered Warriner, raising Emily’s letter. “The other is too deep and enthusiastic, this one is more practical, more fit for business.”
“Do you see any particular defect in this disposition?” Emily asked, seized by chronic self-doubt.
“No, it is well balanced,” said Warriner. “There is more caution, more waiting for wind and tide—I should think his abilities might be beyond his success—but the intellect is very fine. . . . There is a sincerity and integrity that resembles the other.”
“Would this person be a leader, or one who would like best to work alone?” asked Emily, striving for nonchalance.
“I do not think he would be inclined to take the position of leader,” Warriner replied. “There is great self-reliance—does not ask or need the advice of others, but is inclined to let others go their own way.”
This was flattering, but Emily dismissed it. “It appears to me like the description of the outside, and not of the inside,” she complained to her journal that night. “It does not reach me.” No one, not even a clairvoyant, could sense the turmoil she kept so deeply hidden. “He did not remark the intense longing for perfection, the passion for intellectual pursuits and the stormy restlessness of my disposition.” Unless possessed of truly supernatural powers, Warriner could hardly have recognized what even Henry, so close to Emily in age and affection, failed to notice.
“You will be greatly pleased with Millie when you see her again,” Henry wrote to Elizabeth. “She is possessed of a most admirable balance of physical & mental qualities—strong but not heavy, with clear definite common sense, quick, prompt, decided, quiet, cheerful & self possessed.” He admired her unusual combination of imagination, capable shrewdness, and productive energy. “I don’t think Emily knows what it is to be blue,” he insisted, “for she is never idle & keeps up I have no doubt a steady active thinking even in her sleep.”
Emily had recently completed her first practical experience at the bedside of her mother, who was suffering from a “terrible discharging tumour”—a pus-filled boil, or carbuncle—on her back. “I am surprised at my own powers,” Emily wrote, though her clinical satisfaction was tempered with emotional unease. Pious Hannah inspired impatience in her scientific sixth child, and Emily was struck by the sad gap between duty and feeling. “Sickness would lose much of its horror if people were so noble that they attached their friends powerfully to them,” she wrote, “but cold attendance during sickness must be painful and I pitied my mother when I felt how far apart we were.” Attending diligently to Hannah’s care, she kept her feelings, as always, to herself.
Emily’s desperation to launch herself toward something larger grew daily, even as her own doubts held her back. By the summer of 1851, she had had enough. “I have been teaching for five years and my disgust and hatred of this most detestable occupation has risen to a pitch that is almost unendurable,” she scrawled. “And life might be so glorious. Human nature so lofty and yet people go on potter potter in their little contemptible lives and seem to have no more conception of the mysteries around them, of their marvelous existence, than beetles.”
Elizabeth, meanwhile, had found London a darker place than during her first eager visit eighteen months earlier. She arrived at the beginning of October 1850, as autumn began to take hold. Night fell early, daylight was dimmed by a blanket of smog, and her remaining eye burned and blurred. The city depressed her—“the dingy look of every building, the ugliness of the people, their rude unpleasing manners, their vulgar dress”—and the prospect of yet another search for respectable-yet-affordable lodgings, and yet another conservative medical community to confront at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, exhausted her. “I asked myself with astonishment, is this the same London?”
She was more alone this time, the sustaining sweetness of her acquaintance with Charles Plevins having curdled. “I will not speak of him, as I have nothing pleasant to say,” she wrote. “I shall always feel grateful to him for his former kindness—but he is too bitter to suit me.” She had no time for a disappointed admirer. Even her stalwart cousin Kenyon was less solicitous now. On a visit to Paris during Elizabeth’s convalescence,Kenyon had met “a charming young Parisienne” named Marie de St. Simoncourt, and they had married at the end of the summer. “They are so perfectly enchanted with one another that really it is pleasant to think of two human creatures so perfectly happy,” Anna wrote, professing herself terribly fatigued after having supervised the details of their Paris wedding. Elizabeth approved of Kenyon’s choice, even as it diverted his attention from her.
To return to work was a tremendous relief. She found a large front room in Thavies Inn, a drab but respectable address a few steps from the bustle of Holborn, and rose at half past seven as the dome of St. Paul’s, visible from her window, emerged from the morning mist. When the bells of St. Andrew and St. Sepulchre rang nine o’clock, she set out for St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, an imposing quadrangle of pale Georgian facades darkened by decades of coal smoke. A hospital had stood on the site since the twelfth century; in the imposing Great Hall, gold leaf covered the ceiling, and epic murals by William Hogarth lined the grand staircase. Elizabeth had arrived at an ancient locus of British medicine, though the college itself had been formally established only five years since. “A little dark figure in doctorial sack with writing case under arm makes its way through assembling students, who
politely step aside to let it pass,” she wrote, denying herself even the luxury of the female pronoun.
A shortcut along Cock Lane allowed Elizabeth to avoid the teeming Smithfield meat market on her way, though the sounds, sights, and smells of the hospital were hardly better. Six hundred indigent patients filled the beds of St. Bartholomew’s, and hundreds more crowded the benches of the waiting rooms, especially on Thursdays, when the most afflicted, fortunate in their misfortune, would be admitted to fill whatever beds had become vacant. Disease had its seasons: in winter the rooms were full of catarrhal coughing, replaced in summer with the moans of dysenteric cramp. Accident and injury were constants. Screams echoed from the operating theaters, and fumes poured from the apothecary’s copper cauldrons of opiate syrup and “black draught,” a laxative made from senna. The odor of putrefying flesh wafted from the dead house and the dissection rooms, and the distinctive roasted-almond smell of gangrene mingled with the reek of chamber pots. Inpatients did receive adequate meals, but the prevalence of sepsis, erysipelas, and other infections endemic to hospital wards meant they might pay the ultimate price for their porridge and potatoes. The use of antiseptic protocols was still decades away.
The terms of Elizabeth’s admission allowed her to walk the wards, perform dissections if there was a private room available, and sit in on postmortems—as long as the deceased was female. She could attend lectures if the lecturer approved. Thankfully, her new mentor and the warden of the medical college, James Paget, led by example; Elizabeth held an unlimited ticket for his anatomy and physiology classes, and his colleague George Burrows followed suit in principles of medicine. She followed the stout and elderly Clement Hue on his rounds, taking careful notes on a young woman admitted with chest pains. “Auscultation shows a striking derangement of the heart action,” she noted. “The heart appears to hesitate in contracting, then several violent contractions occur in rapid succession.” With her sight compromised, she sharpened her hearing as a diagnostic tool.
ELIZABETH’S TICKET FOR JAMES PAGET’S ANATOMY LECTURES.
COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, MANUSCRIPT DIVISION, BLACKWELL FAMILY PAPERS
As usual, Elizabeth’s strategy for acceptance was to leave no opening for criticism. Paget’s students gave her a round of applause when she joined them, and Lydia North Paget, who served as her husband’s amanuensis, expressed bemused approval. “Well we have our ‘Lady Doctor’ here at last,” she wrote. “The young men have behaved extremely well, and she really appears likely to go on her way quite unmolested.” At the start of each term, Paget invited a dozen students at a time to come for breakfast. Elizabeth, happily included, was pleased with these “gentlemanly fellows,” though they “looked with some curiosity at their new companion.”
The women, in contrast, were disappointing. Invited to a dinner party at the Pagets’, Elizabeth raised a critical eyebrow at the amount of bare skin on display, along with ballooning petticoats and endless frills. “Women so dressed out, don’t look like rational beings,” she complained, “& consequently they cannot expect to be treated as such.” Scornful of the women she hoped to inspire, she nonetheless insisted that her male colleagues recognize and respect her womanhood. Paget himself, watching her from beneath a permanently furrowed brow, told her to expect more resistance from women than from men. “I am prepared for this,” she insisted. “But a work of the ages cannot be hindered by individual feeling. A hundred years hence women will not be what they are now.”
Elizabeth’s blameless hard work masked a growing divergence from the orthodoxy of august St. Bartholomew’s, which—after the investigative spirit of Paris medicine—she found somewhat dull. “Here there is no excitement,” she wrote, “all moves steadily onward, constantly, but without enthusiasm.” The stream of forlorn patients trudged past, accepting their doses of calomel and laudanum, emetics and purgatives. As Elizabeth’s experience deepened, and as the shift from intern to practitioner approached, the question of what constituted legitimate and effective medicine remained hard to answer. At St. Bart’s no one wanted to hear her opinions regarding cold water and fresh air, or her criticisms of the standard materia medica. “I must confess that this study of the old practice is both difficult & disgusting to me,” she wrote, “but it is essential & I shall be diligent.” She could not afford to alienate patrons like Paget.
Meanwhile, based on her own experiences as a patient, and despite her sincere hopes, “neither hydropathy nor mesmerism are what their enthusiastic votaries imagine them to be.” The only way forward, she wrote to Emily, was to begin with “old-established custom”—the ineffective habits of the old guard—and try to establish an independent institution in which to introduce more enlightened approaches. That way “the very instant I feel sure of any improvement I shall adopt it in my practice, in spite of a whole legion of devils,” she wrote. “Now E., future partner, what say you—is it not the only rational course?” Elizabeth’s current approach to medicine was to observe, absorb, and obtain “that bedside knowledge of sickness, which will enable me to commit heresy with intelligence in the future.”
More than ever, Elizabeth wanted Emily with her on her solitary path. “All the gentlemen I meet seem separated by an invincible invisible barrier, and the women who take up the subject are inferior,” she lamented. “It will not always be so; when the novelty of the innovation is past, men & women will be valuable friends in medicine, but for a time that cannot be.” For now, only a fellow Blackwell might merit her unconditional support. She would not risk her fledgling reputation by associating with any woman less dedicated than herself—and no hint of Emily’s doubts or frustrations had reached her. Proud of the diagnostic skill she was acquiring with the stethoscope, Elizabeth instructed her “partner elect” to “auscultate Mother & the boys.”
Though Elizabeth had met no woman in London with whom to share the practice of intelligent heresies, she was, for the first time, finding female friends to discuss them with. A few weeks after settling at Thavies Inn, she received a visit from a young woman who had been attracted to Elizabeth’s reputation as a flower turns toward light. Bessie Rayner Parkes was twenty-one to Elizabeth’s twenty-nine, a distant cousin by marriage, and the only child of “people whose position is so respectable,” Elizabeth reported to Emily, “that the daughter dare not ride in an omnibus.” Yet these same proper parents had given Parkes a liberal Unitarian education, with the result that “she will not wear corsets, she won’t embroider, she reads every heretic book she can get hold of, talks of following a profession, & has been known to go to an evening party, without gloves!”
In Parkes, Elizabeth found a little sister to mentor in progressive ideas. “She is really a very noble girl, but chaotic & without definite aim,” she wrote. “I shall be curious to know, if there are many girls like her, that is girls who think. I fear not.” Parkes, in turn, was entranced by Elizabeth’s history, which Elizabeth, warmed by her interest, related in vivid detail. “Such a tale!” Parkes wrote. “Of energy, & hope; of repulses from men, & scorn of her own countrywomen.” She was particularly impressed by Elizabeth’s illness and subsequent surgery, gazing at her new friend’s face with horrified delight. “I can’t tell which eye it is,” she wrote. “Literally I looked & looked & thought it wasn’t the one I thought last time.” To Parkes, Elizabeth was part reformer, part gothic heroine. “Oh she is such a jolly brick,” she gushed.
The recipient of this ardent account was Barbara Leigh Smith, eldest daughter of a wealthy member of Parliament who had never married her milliner mother, though he was unwavering in support of the five children she bore him. A man of radically progressive politics, Benjamin Leigh Smith might have justified this scandalous liaison with the argument that marriage would have made his mistress and their children his property. His eccentricity extended to his parenting: two years earlier, when his daughter turned twenty-one, he had settled upon her an income of £300 per year—an enviable sum from Elizabeth’s impecunious perspective—
and having the foresight to understand that illegitimacy might cause problems after his death, he took the unusual step of making sure she received access to her inheritance while he lived. Smith’s financial independence made it possible for her to speak her mind, and she had already begun to publish her own ideas on the subject of reform. If Elizabeth was fond of the impulsive, disheveled Parkes, she was drawn to the statuesque Smith with something more like respect. Their friendship would be a lasting one.
Barbara Leigh Smith’s nascent interests in public health and progressive education—and not, at this point, in woman suffrage—aligned with Elizabeth’s own. Indeed, in Smith and Parkes, Elizabeth found spirits more kindred than their activist counterparts in America. That fall of 1850, Marian and Ellen, the youngest Blackwell sister at twenty-two, had attended the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, and reported on it to Elizabeth with enormous enthusiasm. Elizabeth’s response was lukewarm. “I have read through all the proceedings,” she wrote to Marian. “They show great energy, much right feeling, but not a great amount of strong, clear thought.”
As with Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth could not agree with the convention’s endorsement of woman suffrage. She felt, moreover, that the very term woman’s rights was wrong-headed. “I cannot sympathise fully with an anti-man movement,” she continued. “I have had too much kindness, aid, and full reception amongst men to make this attitude of women otherwise than painful to me.” Her aim was toward a loftier, sexless ideal: “The great object of education has nothing to do with woman’s rights, or man’s rights, but with the development of the human soul and body.” Elizabeth was stunned by the prostitutes she saw on every corner in London, “poor wretched sisters . . . decked out in their best, which best is generally a faded shawl and thin, even tattered dress, seeking their wretched living.” She imagined a “grand moral army” of women mobilized in the pursuit of education and enlightened industry, with Queen Victoria herself at its head. Her new English friends seemed ideal comrades-in-arms. She loved their “vigorous thoughtful minds, that will not be contented with a selfish, frivolous life, and are struggling hard to change the senseless customs which fetter them.”
The Doctors Blackwell Page 14