Tomorrow, on 29th May, there is a celebration of the life of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the western world, buried in the graveyard behind Kilmun’s Church in Argyll’s Cowal peninsula.
The celebration
The programme of events, organised by Janette Valentine, runs from 12 noon tomorrow. It includes a conference, with addresses from Val Gillies, Dr Jean Scott and Kirsty Hubbard, followed by question time from the audience.
In the evening, there is dinner and a ceilidh in the Younger Hall at Kilmun.
Full details are to be found on the Cowal Shore Churches website.
Elizabeth Blackwell
Daughter of a Bristol sugar refiner, Elizabeth Blackwell was born in that city on 3rd February 1821 and died on 31st May 1910 and the celebration tomorrow is of the centenary of her burial at Kilmun.
The third of nine children, 6 boys and 3 girls, all well educated – an unusually enlightened circumstance for the girls (her family were Quakers and believed in gender equality), Elizabeth, in the earlier part of her life, lost all of her siblings except a sister, Emily, who also, later, qualified as a doctor
After a fire destroyed her father’s business when she was 11 years old, the family emigrated to the USA, with Samuel, her gather, first establishing a refinery in the city of New York, then moving to do the same in Cincinnati in Ohio.
He died three months later and Elizabeth threw herself into a convoluted series of strategies that wold see her graduate in 1849 from Geneva College Medical School in New York. She had to deal with pretty sustained sexual prejudice throughout, from her fellow – all male – students and fro her tutors.
Banned, by her gender, from practising in most hospitals in America, she went to Paris to study at La Maternité but acquired an infection which led to the loss of one eye and its replacement by a glass one.
That was the end of her training in Pris and in 1857, back in New York, she, her sister Emily (who had qualified as a doctor three years earlier) and Dr Marie Zakrzewska established the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.
Blackwell came back to England for a short time in 1859. She did a year at Bedford College for Women and, never slow off the mark, took advantage of a change to the law. Introduced in 1858 this accepted doctors qualified abroad and practising in England before 1858.
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman doctor, on 1st January 1859, to be entered on the General Medical Council’s medical register.
Returning to the United States, Blackwell played a notable part in the American Civil War, training numerous women as nurses for the Union side. After the war, After the war, in 1868, she established at the Infirmary a Women’s Medical College to train women, physicians, and doctors. Several of those studying there had been trained by her as nurses during the Civil War.
Leaving her sister Emily in charge of the Infirmary in New York, Elizabeth came back to England again in 1869. There, along with Florence Nightingale and Lady Byron, both her friends, she set up an English Hospital. Blackwell taught at London School of Medicine for Women, which she had co-founded, and accepted a chair in gynecology.
Blackwell lived her last years in Hastings on the south coast of England, and spent her last six summers in Kilmun, whose scenic rural tranquillity she loved.
She left instructions that she was to be buried there, in the graveyard behind Kilmun Church. Built in 1841 on the site of a medieval church, the Argyll Mausoleum, currently under restoration, is also in its grounds.
Elizabeth Blackwell lies to the north of the church, with a simple Celtic Cross as tribute to a woman whose remarkable life changed irrevocably the opportunities open to her gender.
The photographs accompanying this article show, from the top:
- Kilmun Chuch on the shores of the Holy Loch in Cowal, by copyright holder David Kelly and reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
- A photograph of the portrait of Elizabeth Blackwell by Joseph Stanley Kozlowski, 1905. The photograph is in the public domain.
- A photograph of a 1974 USA postage stamp commemorating Elizabeth Blackwell and designed by her portrait painter, Joseph Stanley Kozlowski. The artwork is in the Syracuse University Medical School collection. The image is the work of the United States Federal Government and is in the public domain.
When she was in Kilmun she usually stayed at the Kilmun Hotel,(now the Pier Hotel),built by steam pioneer David Napier and in fact a fall down the main stairway of the Hotel is said to have contributed to her death, though she was in failing health at the time. Napier also built six houses in a row along the shore road at Kilmun, known locally as the “tea caddies” because of their shape.
Until recently there was behind the hotel the stable for Napiers stagecoach service. He had opened up a quicker route from the Glasgow area to Inveraray which hitherto had been over the then tortuous Rest and Be Thankful military road by providing a steam boat from Gourock to Kilmun, a carriage from Kilmun to the foot of Loch Eck where passengers boarded another Napier steam boat on the Loch to join another carriage from the head of the loch to St Catherines where they caught a ferry to Inveraray.
It is to be hoped that Janette Valentine’s efforts at organising this event in memory of Elizabeth Blackwell are rewarded by a good turnout.
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