3 pp. including stampless address leaf. To her brother S.[amuel] C. Blackwell, Cincinnati.
“…I had just been arranging with Mrs. Wright to purchase a black baby and dissect with the assistance of Dr. Keller a German anatomist who is acquainted with all the newest discoveries and possesses a microscope of rare power.” When she wrote these startling words, 26 year-old Elizabeth Blackwell, after two years in North and South Carolina teaching school (including unsanctioned classes for African-American slave children) to earn enough money to pursue her wild dream, had moved to Philadelphia to begin applying to Medical Schools. This jaunt to New York for a reunion with her sisters Marian and Anna came after 3 months of rejection from a half dozen schools and the advice of a sympathetic physician that she sail for Paris to attend classes disguised as a man. Meanwhile, she had begun taking private Anatomy lessons, arranging to buy the corpse of a dead Negro baby for dissection, with the help of Mrs. Paulina Wright – a rich widow (later a famous suffragette) who would tour the country giving shocking Anatomy lectures to women, using as prop an imported French mannequin. Unfortunately, Elizabeth wrote, “Mrs. Wright and I cannot study satisfactorily together; she wants to get a rapid general knowledge for immediate use, I want to study it out thoroughly as a foundation.” It was in a dejected mood that Elizabeth had come to New York to give “myself up thoroughly to the enjoyment of that rare thing, a holiday… not to study or think or do anything that I had been accustomed to do, but walk and bathe and sleep, laugh and flirt – in fact, be a regular medical student…but I do assure you it will do me a world of good if I can entirely throw off my usual self for a few weeks…” Though this large city, where she had lived as a child before her family moved to Ohio, was not a perfect setting for relaxation. “…I experienced an unutterable disgust in entering the whited sepulcher of a city, and am positively rejoiced at the prospect of leaving. I have not the slightest wish to renew my acquaintance with any person or place that I’ve ever know before…” Other parts of the city, were “beautiful, gay and varied as a flower garden, but it made me bitter – I wanted to burn it down…” Elizabeth was in the same dejected mood when her eccentric sister Anna, about to join a Socialist commune, introduced Elizabeth to her friends Albert Brisbane, a leading proponent of Socialism, and Mrs. Mary Gove, another notorious lecturer on Anatomy, described by a biographer as “one of the most infamous and influential women in America, a radical social reformer” who preached equality in marriage, free love, and the health risks of corsets and masturbation. Elizabeth “drank tea and took dinner with Mrs. Gove, but I don’t like her, [tho?] she is a woman of energy. I could not feel at ease in her society, in the first place, too much had been said about me to her, I knew it and felt constrained, then our natures are so different that I felt out of my sphere with her…when I sat with Anna & Brisbane and Mrs. Gove, I felt so completely out of my sphere, that I felt a sudden intense disgust, and wanted to set my foot upon them and crush them, like so many spiders – but instead of that, I sat perfectly mute and went away without having said six sentences…” Her visit was not entirely wasted. While seriously considering emigration to Paris, she sent twelve more letters of application to medical schools in rural New York. Some 80 days later, Elizabeth finally received a positive response from a small college in Geneva, New York, informing her that the school’s medical students had voted (though, unknown to her, merely as a joke) to allow her to join them - “which some may deem bold in the present state of society…” Two years after that, Elizabeth Blackwell would make history as the first woman to receive a Medical degree in America. Early letters of Elizabeth Blackwell are rarely found outside of institutions, most of her family correspondence being held by the Library of Congress and the Radcliffe-Schlesinger Library at Harvard. This letter is one of a number, unknown to historians, which will be offered by PBA Galleries in coming months. Full transcript of the text available on request.