LETTER: ALS to her brother Samuel C. Blackwell.
Blackwell Buys a “Black Baby” for Dissection
Blackwell, Elizabeth. Autograph letter signed, “E.,” to her brother Samuel C. Blackwell, August 5, 1847; bifolium leaf, three pages covered; creased where folded; postmarked on integral address leaf.
Unpublished letter from 26-year-old Blackwell to her brother Samuel (the future husband of Antoinette Brown). In this letter, predating her medical school training by two years, Blackwell discusses various opportunities to study. These include the purchase of “a black baby” for the purposes of dissection: “… I had just been arranging with Mrs. Wright to purchase a black baby & dissect with the assistance of Dr. Keller a German anatomist who is acquainted with all newest discoveries & possesses a microscope of rare power…”
Blackwell, who spent 1945-47 teaching in North and South Carolina to earn money to fund her medical training, had also undertaken private studies with two doctors, John and Samuel Dickson, brothers, in Asheville and Charleston. She had moved from the Carolinas to Philadelphia to apply to medical schools, but having been rejected by a half dozen – and having been advised to attend classes in Paris disguised as a man – she composed this letter on a trip to New York for a reunion with her sisters Marian and Anna.
Meanwhile she had begun taking private anatomy lessons, arranging to buy the corpse of a dead African American baby for dissection, with the help of Mrs. Paulina Wright, a rich widow and later famous suffragette, who would tour the country giving “shocking” anatomy lectures to women using as a prop an imported French mannequin. Unfortunately, as Elizabeth writes, “Mrs. Wright and I cannot study satisfactorily together; she wants to get a rapid general knowledge for immediate use, I want to study it out thoroughly as a foundation.” It was in a dejected mood that Elizabeth had come to New York to give “myself up thoroughly to the enjoyment of that rare thing, a holiday… not to study or think or do anything that I had been accustomed to do, but walk and bathe and sleep, laugh and flirt – in fact, be a regular medical student … but I do assure you it will do me a world of good if I can entirely throw off my usual self for a few weeks…”
The booming metropolis, where she had been raised before her family moved to Ohio, was not conducive to relaxation: “… I experienced an unutterable disgust in entering the whited sepulcher of a city, and am positively rejoiced at the prospect of leaving. I have not the slightest wish to renew my acquaintance with any person or place that I’ve ever known before…”
Blackwell was in the same dispirited mood when her eccentric sister Anna, about to join a Socialist commune, introduced Elizabeth to her friends Albert Brisbane, a leading proponent of Socialism, and Mrs. Mary Gove, another notorious lecturer on Anatomy, described by a biographer as “one of the most infamous and influential women in America, a radical social reformer” who preached equality in marriage, free love, and the health risks of corsets and masturbation. Blackwell “drank tea and took dinner with Mrs. Gove, but I don’t like her , tho’ she is a woman of energy. I could not feel at ease in her society, in the first place, too much had been said about me to her, I knew it and felt constrained, then our natures are so different that I felt out of my sphere with her … when I sat with Anna & Brisbane and Mrs. Gove, I felt so completely out of my sphere, that I felt a sudden intense disgust, and wanted to set my foot upon them and crush them, like so many spiders – but instead of that, I sat perfectly mute and went away without having said six sentences…”
Her visit was not entirely wasted. While seriously considering emigration to Paris, she sent twelve more letters of application to medical schools in rural New York. Some eighty days later, she received a positive response from a small college in Geneva, New York, informing her that the school’s
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