THE FIRST WOMAN DOCTOR.

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 15, 18 July 1910, Page 9

THE FIRST WOMAN DOCTOR.

The death occurred at Hastings (England) on the Ist of June, in her ninetieth year, of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to have her name inscribed on the British Medical Register. Miss Blackwell used to relate (says a writer in the Daily Mail) how the chance suggestion of a iriend suffering from a painful malady led her to begin her preliminary studies at Ashville, Carolina, U.S.A. _, in 1845, and how she was refused admission to the medical schools of the Universities of Philadelphia and New York. She was more fortunate, however, in her aplication to tho Geneva University, New York State, and graduated there in 1849. Subsequently she spent some months in Paris at La Maternite and in the wards of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. Here she made friends with Miss Florence Nightingale and a little group of women who were then attempting to enter the medical profession, among them being Miss Jex Blake and j Miss Garvett, now Mvs. Gavrett Anderson. Dr. Blackwell's name was placed on the British Medical Register in 1859, where it remained alone, tho solitary representative of her sex, until 1870, when those of the two women mentioend above were added. Dr. Blackwell was the founder of the National Health-Society of London, and was also associated with the foundation of the School of Medicine for Women. | She was of English birth, her parents having gone to America in 1832.