Elizabeth Blackwell Quotes

None of us can know what we are capable of until we are tested.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

I do not wish to give (women) a first place, still less a second one- but the complete freedom to take their true place, whatever it may be.

For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.

It is not easy to be a pioneer but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.

Prejudice is more violent the blinder it is.

When life follows the course of our desires, it is easy to be swept along without thought.

The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

Health has its science, as well as disease.

It is not easy to be a pioneer - but oh, it is fascinating!

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel.

Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.

Methods and conclusions formed by half the race only, must necessarily require revision as the other half of humanity rises into conscious responsibility.

The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.

I must have something to engross my thoughts, some object in life which will fill this vacuum, and prevent this sad wearing away of the heart.

The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research.

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman.

I felt more than ever the necessity of my mission. But I went home out of spirits, I hardly know why. I must work by myself all life long.

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

I, who so love a hermit life for a good part of the day, find myself living in public, and almost losing my identity.

It is well worth the efforts of a lifetime to have attained knowledge which justifies an attack on the root of all evil ... which asserts that because forms of evil have always existed in society, therefore they must always exist.

[On sex:] ... the total deprivation of it produces irritability.

It is a well-established fact that in healthy loving women, uninjured by the too frequent lesions which result from childbirth, increasing physical satisfaction attaches to the ultimate physical expression of love. ... Love between the sexes is the highest and mightiest form of human sexual passion.