Elizabeth Blackwell

Elizabeth Blackwell was born on this day in 1821.

After much struggle Blackwell became the first woman in America to receive a formal medical education (graduating first in her class in 1849) and practice medicine. A native of Great Britain, after spending much of her life in America she returned to England where she became a professor of gynecology at the London School of Medicine for Women which, with others, she founded.

She was a prolific author.

She was both a political and religious radical. An active abolitionist, while in America she attended Unitarian services and was a member of the Cincinnati congregation. (Her sister-in-law Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell would become the first woman ordained in the Congregational church and the first woman to become a Unitarian minister.) In England she attended Anglican services and became active in the Christian Socialist movement.