America's First Female Doctor

I am over the moon excited! After publishing seven novellas with Barbour (with more to come next year), I finally have a novel coming out! Sand Creek Serenade will release on March 14, 2019, so in the coming months, I’ll be telling you about different aspects of the story. To start with, this novel tells of the romance between Dr. Sadie Hoppner, a young female doctor, and Five Kills, a Cheyenne brave, in 1864 Colorado Territory. 

In case you missed my earlier post, you can read about becoming a doctor in the Old West here. But have you ever thought about what it would’ve taken for a woman to become a doctor in that age? As I depict in Sand Creek Serenade, Sadie studied under her father’s and brother’s tutelage, reading medical texts, debating the merits of a certain course of treatment, and practicing procedures alongside them until she could competently treat patients on her own. However, that wasn’t the only way to become a full-fledged doctor. Many chose to attend expensive universities for their medical training.

At some point in history, the first woman had to make the choice to attend medical school. Who was she? What led her to study medicine? What battles did she face along the way? 

Miss Elizabeth Blackwell

Well, I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first woman doctor. She is the trailblazing woman to first pursue a degree from a medical college. She was the trendsetter who opened the doors for every woman who dreamed of becoming a doctor. Elizabeth Blackwell was a life-long learner who challenged barriers and evened the field for all women.

Born in Bristol, England, in 1821, Elizabeth was the third of nine children. She and her siblings were educated at home, and in her early life, Elizabeth learned to speak German and French. But after a move to America, finally settling in Cincinnati, Ohio, Elizabeth’s father died unexpectedly when at her age eighteen. Across the next handfuls of years, Elizabeth and her siblings taught school or tutored students privately. However, Elizabeth longed for something more challenging.

The idea of pursuing medicine came from an offhand remark by a dying friend. Mary Donaldson, stricken with cancer, commented to Elizabeth that it was difficult and awkward to have exams and procedures done by male doctors. Knowing Elizabeth’s love of learning, Mary suggested that she study to become a doctor.

Miss Blackwell was repulsed! She was turned off by anything dealing with the body and had no desire to learn medicine. However, the idea wouldn’t leave her alone, so she discussed it with family and friends, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. With their encouragement and blessing, she set out to pursue a medical education. First, she had to work several years to save the $3000 she would need. She took teaching positions in different Asheville and Charleston academies, renting rooms from doctors who allowed her to peruse their medical texts by night. She also studied anatomy under the tutelage of a physician who thought her cause was a noble one. After three years of saving, she had the tuition money in hand.

As you might expect, applying and gaining acceptance to a medical school was an uphill climb. At that time, women were seen as unbusinesslike, lacking in logic and common sense, and morally unfit for such a profession. So her applications to the twenty-nine most prestigious medical colleges in Philadelphia and New York were rejected. Only when she applied to a smaller school, Geneva Medical College in western New York State, did she finally get an acceptance. She was twenty-four at the time.

However, when she set foot on campus, she realized her acceptance was a joke. The administration had asked the student body whether they should allow a woman to study medicine, and the student body agreed, expecting they’d get a good laugh at Miss Blackwell’s expense. The men were sorely mistaken!

Miss Blackwell entered Geneva Medical College in November—right in the middle of a term. The student body laughed at her. The townsfolk thought her insane or immoral. But she pushed through, rose to the top of her class, and graduated with a medical degree at the age of twenty-eight. 

Dr. Blackwell, later in life.

You might think she’d made it, but her battles were far from over. No one would allow her to set up
shop and practice medicine in America, so she returned to England, only to find the doors were closed there too. She finally took a student midwife position at La Maternite, a French hospital, and learned obstetrics. But she took a bad turn when she developed purulent ophthalmia, an inflammation of the eye, which led to her having to have her eye removed completely. Her dreams of becoming a surgeon were gone.

Not one to give up, she eventually returned to America, set up a private practice, and began giving lectures and writing articles on women’s health and the importance of physical education for girls. By 1853, Elizabeth’s sister, Emily, had also graduated from medical school and joined her sister. A German doctor, Marie Zakrzewska, also joined the sisters, and the trio opened a clinic in the slums of New York, treating women and children. After a few years, they closed the clinic and opened a different facility—the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857. The Infirmary not only provided much-needed care for New York’s residents, but it also became a training facility for women seeking to become doctors and nurses. 

1974 US Postage Stamp commemorating
Dr. Blackwell's great achievement

Later in her career, Elizabeth helped to train female doctors and nurses to do battlefield medicine during the Civil War, she founded the first American medical school for women—The Women’s Medical College, helped form the National Health Society of England, and assisted in the creation of the London School of Medicine for Women. As her health declined later in life, she turned her attention to writing, speaking out on various areas needing social reform. She penned her autobiography, at least four books, and various essays and articles on a full range of topics. Upon her death in 1910, there were over 7,000 women in American who were practicing medicine after having received a degree from a medical training institution. That is quite a legacy!

It's Your Turn: Have you heard of Elizabeth Blackwell? What do you find most impressive about her life?

Jennifer Uhlarik discovered the western genre as a pre-teen when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a B.A. in writing, she has finaled and won in numerous writing competitions, and been on the ECPA best-seller list numerous times. In addition to writing, she has held jobs as a private business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite—a full-time homemaker. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers and lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, college-aged son, and four fur children.

The Mail-Order Brides Collection: available now.

What kind of woman would answer an advertisement and marry a stranger?

Escape into the history of the American West along with nine couples whose relationships begin with advertisements for mail-order brides. Placing their dreams for new beginnings in the hands of a stranger, will each bride be disappointed, or will some find true love?

The Brigand and the Bride by Jennifer Uhlarik
1876, Arizona
Jolie Hilliard weds a stranger to flee her outlaw family but discovers her groom is an escaped prisoner. Will she ever find happiness on the right side of the law?

Random Medical Facts of the Civil War

I guess maybe I’m a bit strange, but I’ve always found reading about the practice of medicine interesting. Not interesting enough to want to pursue it as a career like my mother—formerly an RN—did. But all the way back to my middle and early high school years, I recall sitting down to read her nursing textbooks, the medical dictionary close at hand to look up all the big words I didn’t understand, just to find out how one would treat pneumonia or other illnesses. (Yes—I said I was strange!) Even today, I find tidbits of old medical practices from times gone by to be interesting. So I thought I’d share a few from the Civil War with you today.

Random Fact #1: Necessity was, in fact, the mother of invention!

A sample of a Civl War-era surgeon's tool kit. A typical kit
contained two surgical saws, cutting pliers, a curved probe,
clamps, retractor, a brush, and trepanning instruments.

Today, we take it for granted that we can drive to the nearest drug store and pick up over-the-counter pain medications for a headache, antibiotics for an infection, or pretty much any other supplies we might need. In the 1860s, many of our modern medical conveniences hadn’t yet been invented. And even for those that had been, wartime meant that supplies were often low, or they might take longer to reach their destination. In the case of the South, supply lines were blockaded, so southerners had to find ways to go around or slip through the blockades—or they did without. Or…there was another alternative. Learn to make the medicines themselves. Southerners created medical laboratories where experimentation with all sorts of indigenous plants, barks, leaves, and roots was done. Herbal remedies were nothing new, mind you—people had been using medicinal plants to treat ailments and injuries for centuries. But the Southerners didn’t only pick existing plants, dry them, grind them to powder, and put them in their tea. No, these inventive souls tried cross-pollinating various species. They employed grafting processes of yet others. And by the end of the war, they’d found ways to produce opium and other common medicines of the day without having to run the blockades to get them.

Random Fact #2: The most popular medicine of the war was…

Alcohol. Medicinal whiskey and brandy were the most oft-dispensed medications between 1861 and 1865. In fact, because morphine and ether were so hard to come by, copious amounts of whiskey were often the only anesthetics available to wounded soldiers who had to undergo amputations. And depending on what illness you were being treated for, other (sometimes toxic) things were added to the beverage to cure what ailed you—anything from opium to cayenne pepper, to dried/powered plants, leaves, and roots to “fix you right up.”

Random Fact #3: The treatment could be worse than the illness.

Recent burials at City Point Hospital Collection of the
New York Historical Society, nhnycw/ad ad35012

All told, roughly 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War. Of the dead, twice as many succumbed to illness and disease—dysentery, typhoid, and typhus being some of the most common—as did those who died from wounds received during battle. Of course, in those days and in wartime conditions, treatment was far from consistent. One doctor would treat a case of dysentery one way, the next doctor would treat it another. In one such case, a doctor in a Philadelphia hospital began to treat a man who’d suffered with diarrhea for three solid months. The treatment prescribed by this doctor included heavy doses of lead acetate, opium, sulfuric acid, belladonna, ipecac, and calomel, among other things. The poor fellow suffered three months with dysentery only to die two weeks into his “treatment!”

Random Fact #4: Pus was a “sign of healing.”

A typical Civil War field surgery...
open air and very unsanitary

We take it for granted today that doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners know to scrub thoroughly and don gloves, masks, and gowns before providing critical care in emergency situations. But doctors in Civil War field hospitals had no such understanding—and they made little effort to prepare their makeshift surgical areas before the next badly wounded soldier was carried in. At most, a bucket of water would be thrown over the operating table to clear off the previous patient’s blood. Medical instruments were not sterilized between surgeries. Instead, they were quickly rinsed and reused. Sponges, rags, and rinse water were not changed out for fresh ones between patients. Bacteria was rampant in such an environment, and the fact that the doctors likely didn’t, or rarely, washed their hands between surgeries only furthered the spread. The doctors in that day actually thought that the appearance of “laudable pus” in a wound or site of amputation was a sign of healing. I wonder how they explained the huge death tolls of their patients, despite the appearance of the healing pus?

Random Fact #5: The Rebel wounded healed faster than the Yanks?

A Civil War field hospital. The wounded were left to convalesce on the
ground in field hospitals.

There’s a story I’ve heard that military hospitals during the war sometimes treated—or at least housed—both Union and Confederate soldiers under the same roof. In one such tale, soldiers of both sides were sent to the Union infirmary at Chattanooga. During a particularly difficult time when traditional medicines were hard to come by, Union doctors treated the Federal soldiers’ wounds with chloroform, and the wounds were covered or packed with lint to keep maggots from them. The Rebel wounded were not afforded such “luxuries” in their care so, gross as it sounds, flies laid eggs in the wounds and maggots soon formed. To the great surprise of the doctors, the Union patients’ wounds grew infected and worsened while the Confederate patients’ wounds were clean and began to heal. What neither side’s doctors understood at that time was bacteria. These creepy maggots were helping rid the wounded men of bacteria so that healing could come. Despite seeing the proof of the medicinal benefits of maggots, the Union doctors continued to pack or cover the wounds with lint, which continued the process of the Rebel soldiers healing faster than their Yankee counterparts.

It’s Your Turn: Were you aware of any of these medical facts? Which ones were new to you?

Jennifer Uhlarik discovered the western genre as a pre-teen, when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a B.A. in writing, she has won and finaled in numerous writing competitions. In addition to writing, she has held jobs as a private business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite—a full-time homemaker. She currently writes historical novellas of the American West for Barbour Publishing and works as a Content Editor for Firefly Southern Fiction. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers and lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, college-aged son, and four fur children.

COMING FEBRUARY 1, 2018 

The Mail-Order Brides Collection

What kind of woman would answer an advertisement and marry a stranger?

Escape into the history of the American West along with nine couples whose relationships begin with advertisements for mail-order brides. Placing their dreams for new beginnings in the hands of a stranger, will each bride be disappointed, or will some find true love?