Today we celebrate the birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.

Born in 1821 in Bristol, England, she moved with her family to the U.S. in 1832. After her father died, she became a school teacher, but wanted to pursue medicine.

At the time, women in the United States could not vote and society discouraged them from pursuing many types of careers, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that Blackwell was rejected from every medical school to which she applied. She was ultimately accepted to Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York (now Hobart and William Smith Colleges) as part of a joke – the faculty, inclined to reject her application, put the decision to a vote by the students, who voted unanimously to accept her because they either thought it was a joke that would make the faculty look bad or because they thought it would be funny to have a female in their midst.

In 1849, Blackwell received her medical degree, despite being shunned by the locals: “as I walked backwards and forwards to college the ladies stopped to stare at me, as at a curious animal. I afterwards found that I had so shocked Geneva propriety that the theory was fully established either that I was a bad woman, whose designs would gradually become evident, or that, being insane, an outbreak of insanity would soon be apparent.”

Blackwell had to move to Paris to actually practice medicine, but she returned and helped other women break into field. In 1857 she launched the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and in 1868 she founded the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary. By the time she died in 1910, more than 7,000 women had become licensed physicians and surgeons in the United States.

As a man whose life has been influenced greatly by women in the sciences, I’m touched by Blackwell’s legacy. My mother and two of her sisters are physicians. One of my first scientific mentors – I worked for her as a summer student at the NIH – was internist Rebecca Pauly. Several female biologists taught courses I took in graduate school. As a postdoctoral fellow I worked with neuroscientist Marnie Halpern, whose training and support were invaluable.

I can’t imagine a world without female physicians and scientists. Thank you, Dr. Blackwell.