LETTER: ALS to her sister Emily.
Elizabeth Blackwell to Emily Blackwell
on Several Leading Figures of Women’s Medicine
and
On the Establishment of the New York Women’s Hospital
Blackwell, Elizabeth. Autograph letter signed, “E.” [Elizabeth Blackwell] to [Emily Blackwell], May 22, [1854], one bifolium, four pp; two horizontal folding creases, faint browning to fold.
A candid and substantive letter from one of the prime agents in the reform and advancement of women’s health, Elizabeth Blackwell, to her collaborator, colleague, and sister, Emily Blackwell, involving other central actors at a crucial moment to the cause.
On May 22, 1854, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell wrote to her sister, the newly minted Dr. Emily Blackwell, recently arrived in Edinburgh to continue her studies with Sir James Young Simpson, with “two little items of news” that would prove to be quite major. “There is,” she writes, “a prospect of establishing a large hospital in New York for the treatment of female diseases and obstetrics.” Blackwell elaborates by describing her meeting that day with Dr. J. Marion Sims, whom she had recently heard lecture on the “necessity of such a hospital,” and whose recent experiments in gynecological surgery marked the beginning of modern obstetrics. During the course of their meeting, which Blackwell details at length, Dr. Sims spoke of being “resolved to explode fully [the] hypocrisy, cliqueism and old fogyism” he’d encountered among N.Y. physicians, and Blackwell assesses that “he is thoroughly in favor of women studying, and will treat them justly, which is all we want.” She presciently concludes her report on Dr. Sims’ plans:
The whole affair will be much grander than anything I can hope to establish for many many years, and would answer our purpose, if his ideas can be carried out. I think I shall help him in every way I can, and that his coming will be an important matter to New York Medicine.
The following year, Dr. Sims would establish Woman’s Hospital, on Madison Avenue and 29th Street. Consisting of thirty beds on four floors of a rented house, it was the first hospital devoted entirely to obstetrics. While Emily Blackwell would be considered for the position of chief assistant to Dr. Sims, for political reasons she was passed over.
The second bit of news was of even greater consequence to the lives of the Doctors Blackwell and to the state of women’s medical health in general: “I have at last got a student,” Elizabeth writes, “one in whom I can take a great deal of interest. Marie Zachkrohefska [sic], a german about twenty-six.” Blackwell recounts her new pupil’s history: she had served as chief midwife in “the great Berlin hospital,” and had taught over 200 students at the medical school attached to it; on the advice of a Viennese doctor, she emigrated to the United States following the death of her mentor, only to be discouraged by a German doctor in New York who insisted “she must be a nurse.” Finally,
thoroughly disheartened at the end of a year, every feeling rebelling at the idea of going as nurse, she went in desperation to the House of the Friendless, where the Matron told her of me. There is stuff in her, and I am going to do my best to bring it out. She must become Doctor... She has a natural love for the profession, but she must be widened out by the other branches and the title is essential.
Blackwell reports that her student “has commenced reading Medicine with me,” and that she has been helping at the Dispensary for Poor Women and Children that Elizabeth had opened the year before. Blackwell asks her sister to make an estimate of the costs she would incur to study at the medical school at Western Reserve, from which Emily had just graduated with honors.
From the point of view of women’s medicine, the convergence of these three women is nothing less than providential. Marie Zakrzewska would go on to obtain her medical degree from Western Reserve, and upon graduating would return to New York t
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