Emily Blackwell (October 8, 1826 – September 7, 1910) was an American physician and women's rights activist. She was the second woman to earn a medical degree at what is now Case Western Reserve University, after Nancy Talbot Clark. She made major advancements in the medical scene, assisting in the start of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and creating the Women's Central Association of Relief. Blackwell, along with her sister Elizabeth, established the Women's Medical College in New York City. Shortly after, she helped form the London School of Medicine for Women. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
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Early life and education
Blackwell was born on October 8, 1826, in Bristol, England. She was the sixth of nine surviving children of Samuel and Hannah Lane Blackwell. The Blackwell family had been very prosperous for the time, educating Emily with private tutors. The Blackwell household was said to be very intelligent and stimulating. Especially because her father Samuel was many things including a dissident, reformer, and a lay preacher. At a young age Emily was shy but extremely intelligent, she would perform different experiments in her family attic. Also in her youth Emily became an "amateur expert" in certain fields like flowers and birds. She gained this title through reading extensively about and observing different flowers and birds around the family's house. Blackwell's parents were considered to be liberal in their view of education and pushed mathematics and science on her at a young age. In 1832, Blackwell and her family emigrated to the United States. They spent time living in New York City, NY and Jersey City, New Jersey before her family finally settled near Cincinnati, Ohio in 1837. Her father passed shortly after this move, in 1838, when Emily was at the age of eleven, and by 1844, the family was living at Lane Theological Seminary in Walnut Hills. It was here that the children made friends with Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose father had founded the seminary.