What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries Read Online Free PDF

1813 … passed through the grades of assistant surgeon and surgeon in various regiments … Upon his death, [he] was discovered to be a woman.
    Over 80 years later the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps gave her a fitting epitaph:
    Whoever was ‘James Barry’ she has the distinction of being first—the first woman doctor of the British Isles. Secondly—one who has … served her country in all climates with distinction, and if she preferred to do so by the only way available in her lifetime, by assuming the trappings of the male sex, all the more credit to her courage and pertinacity.
    If James Barry was the first known female medical graduate in the English-speaking world, albeit a status gained and maintained in heavy and lifelong disguise, who were the true believers who slugged it out with the medical establishment to gain the first legitimate toehold for women in the medical profession?
    Elizabeth Blackwell, an American graduate of British birth, is regarded as being the very first.
    The Blackwells were a middle-class family from Bristol, England. Elizabeth’s father, Samuel, a sugar-factory owner, was a religious man and held unfashionable ideas on equality in education and independence for both sons and daughters. She herself was born in 1821, the third of what were to be eight surviving children. When Elizabeth was 11 years old, financial disaster overtook her father, and the family migrated to New York. Samuel died a bankrupt when Elizabeth was 17, whereupon she and her sisters opened a school and paid off the debts.
    Although there had never been a female medical graduate in America, she was determined to become a doctor, partly to fulfil her father’s ambition, partly to right the wrong a friend had suffered—the friend had died from a uterine disorder as she would not seek advice from a (male) doctor—and partly to satisfy an urge in her feisty nature to do the impossible.
    After 29 colleges had refused her application, Geneva College in New York State agreed to take her. The faculty had initially refused her application, but agreed to refer it to the student body, stipulating that any decision regarding admission must be unanimous. The students foresaw entertainment and notoriety, and voted ‘yes’—with one exception, and he was sat upon until he changed his mind.
    Miss Blackwell did the then usual two-year course, graduating as best student in 1849, and by so doing she seems to have set a pattern of excellence that women in medicine have found difficult to shake off since. Nonetheless, at her graduation ceremony she declined to walk in the academic procession ‘because it would not be ladylike’. Her success inspired the English humorous journal Punch to publish some congratulatory verses to ‘Doctrix Blackwell’.
    Although she was well received, almost feted, in New York, it was more as a freak than as a serious medical doctor, and openings did not present themselves. Elizabeth went to the more liberated Paris, but found that she could only get a job as a midwife. At work she contracted an inflammation of the eyes, which was diagnosed as gonococcal ophthalmia. In June 1850 the affected eye was excised, leaving shattered any thoughts of her being a surgeon.
    Dr Blackwell was welcomed in London. At St Bartholomew’s Hospital she was able to work in every department except gynaecology!
    On her return to America she was refused every post at every hospital to which she applied. She began to lecture on ‘The Laws of Life’, became known about town and steadily built up a large private practice, mainly of young and indigent women. Ultimately she opened a hospital staffed entirely by women.
    In 1869 she moved permanently to England, and in the teeth of great opposition helped found the London School of Medicine for Women (later the Royal Free). For a short time Elizabeth Blackwell was its professor of gynaecology.
    Dr Blackwell never married but did adopt a seven-year-old orphan, Kitty Barry