Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Bristol, England on February 3, 1821. She was the third of nine children. She moved to New York City when she was 11 because her father wanted to help abolish slavery and for financial reasons. In 1836, their sugar refinery was burned down. Even though it was rebuilt, Blackwell's refinery ran into business problems. They moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1838 trying to re-establish the business. Three weeks after they moved to Cincinnati, however, on 7 August 1838, Blackwell's father died from biliary fever, leaving the big family with no money. Blackwell and her sisters all worked as teachers to help raise money. The idea of studying medicine first came to her when her friend was dying of a sickness. In her book Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, published in 1895, Dr. Blackwell said that she "hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust." …show more content…
They told her it was a good idea, it was too expensive, and this kind of education was not available to women. But she convinced the physicians to let her read medicine with them for a year, and applied to all the medical schools in New York and Philadelphia. She also applied to twelve more schools in the northeast states, but was declined by all of them until Geneva Medical College in western New York accepted her in 1847. The faculty let the students vote if Blackwell could join. Being an all-male student body, the faculty thought they would never agree to a woman joining them, and so they allowed them to vote on her admission. As a joke, they voted "yes," and she got in, despite the unwillingness of most students and