Women pulled away their skirts when she passed!

Crowds gathered in the streets to stare at her, whistled, jeered, insulted her.

Small boys hung by their finger tips from the window sills to catch a glimpse of this amazing creature—a woman who dared to study medicine in a classroom crowded with men, in this year of 1847.

This woman was Elizabeth Blackwell, pioneer not only of medicine as a career for women, but innovator as well of some of the outstanding medical reforms of her day. Her admission to the small New York medical school which finally accepted her was the result of a joke, an exuberant prank played on the faculty by a mischievous student body.

Of course, no one actually believed she would come. When she did, the newspapers were agog. Reporters flocked to the classroom. Visitors crowded the lectures. Her conduct, her appearance, the impression she made on those around her were reported with all the interest given to some notorious figure at a great murder trial. Even her phrenob—the shape and bumps of her head—were studied.

In New York, indignant landlords would not rent her an office. Anonymous letters of insult crowded her mail, and twice mobs threatened her life and that of her patients!

This small, well-bred woman with her shy manner and Quaker-like bonnets, was not only the first woman to graduate from a medical college, the first woman to enter an American hospital as an intern, the first woman to be enrolled on the Medical Register of Great Britain, she was also the founder of a great woman's hospital, staffed by women, operated by women, for women and children alone. She founded the first school of nursing in America. She helped to establish the battlefield nursing services of the Civil War. She founded a medical school for women, introducing new subjects and a longer, more thorough, course than that offered at any American College.

She taught health education, hygiene, preventative medicine, in a day when these words were strange, new and even the medical giants had not recognized them. She introduced new and humane ideas in the care of the sick: the "home visitor," precursor of the modern visiting nurse, the "visiting physician," antedating by far the modern concept of "out-patient care" as given by great hospitals.

She wrote books on health, social hygiene, and disease prevention which were renounced at first, then accepted as textbooks in the subjects. She founded the National Health Society in England, in 1871.

Florence Nightingale was her dearest friend. Charles Kingsley called her "a hero!" Rosetti, George Eliot, Lady Byron admired her. And she lived to see her portrait hung in honor in he college that had admitted her as the result of a student prank!

From the dust jacket