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Celebrating the bicentenary of trailblazing doctor’s birth
1 Wilson Street in St Paul’s would be nothing but an unassuming terraced home if not for a small green plaque commemorating a Bristol-born pioneer.
Elizabeth Blackwell, born on February 3, 1821 in this very house became the first women to be on the UK Medical Register.
Blackwell is commemorated in New York with a statue within the grounds of her medical school and has inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, but Bristol remembers this ground-breaking woman by just the small green plaque.
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She lived in the house until 11-years-old, when her father moved his wife and ten children to the USA.
Becoming a doctor wasn’t a “calling” for the first woman to receive a medical degree in the US, instead it was part of the long running fight for gender equality.
Elizabeth Blackwell was born in St Paul’s. Photo: Joseph Stanley Kozlowski/Upstate Medical University, New York, Library
She started teaching as way for her to earn money in the wake of her father’s death just a few years after the family moved to the states and was determined to train as a physician.
She was accepted into Geneva Medical School in New York as a joke, but successfully earned her degree in 1849.
February 3, 2021 marks the bicentenary of Blackwell’s birth at 1 Wilson Street.
In the 200 years since her birth, much has changed. At the time, she was a radical voice for women’s rights, campaigned to abolish slavery, for a more moral government and for liberation of prudery.
She never married, prizing her independence. She opened the New York Infirmary for Women in 1857 and worked with Florence Nightingale, Sophia Jex-Blake, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, her sister Emily Blackwell, and Thomas Henry Huxley to found the first medical school for women in England, the London School of Medicine for Women.
The plaque commemorating Blackwell is tucked away on Wilson Street. Photo: Martin Booth
Blackwell died in 1910, aged 89, but her legacy remains in Bristol.
In 2013, the University of Bristol launched the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research, which improves human health and wellbeing through research and, of course, the small green plaque remains on 1 Wilson Street.
Main photo: Martin Booth
Read more: 17 trailblazing Bristol women
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