Elizabeth Blackwell Becomes America's First Woman Doctor

On January 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from Geneva Medical College in the Finger Lakes town of Geneva, New York, becoming the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. She had only gotten in because the faculty, unwilling to decide themselves, put her application to a vote of the all-male student body, assuming the students would kill it. Instead the class voted her in unanimously, laughing the whole time, sure it was a prank. Two years later nobody was laughing: Blackwell graduated at the head of her class, and when she was handed her diploma she promised to spend her life honoring it.