PIONEER OF WOMEN DOCTORS.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12502, 1 April 1909, Page 1

PIONEER OF WOMEN DOCTORS.

*^Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, the . first woman medical practitioner, botb^in America and England, celebrated her eiglity-eiglith birthday, recently (says the "Daily Express"). For 30 years she has made her home at Hastings, having found in impossible to live in London. It is doubttul whether many of the girl students entering the great hospitals nowadays realise the earnest fight to make their .path easy by Dr Blackwell. "I Bave striven and lived to see women triumphant," she says, "and that is all I want." It was DrBlackwell who first refused to take as final the indignant and astonished answer wliich university after university gave when she. applied for admission. It was she who at last opened thedoors — and left them ajar for other women to follow— at Geneva University, New York. . The . professors there, unable to refuse or willing to consent to her admission, left the matter to the students, and they unanimously decided in her favour. She took her degree— the first ever taken by a. woman— at Geneva in 1849. She was riot, however, a native American, for her parents emigrated from Bristol where she was born, during her early childhood. Ten years after she took her degree she came back to her native land, and her name was inscribed on the "Medical Register," which had only just been founded. Once again she was first among women.