Elizabeth Blackwell

(1821 - 1910)

When Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from the Geneva Medical College at the top of her class in 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive a medical degree. She helped form the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857; trained nurses during the Civil War; and, after consulting Florence Nightingale, opened the Woman’s Medical College in 1868. She died in her native England in 1910 at the age of eighty-nine.