In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America or England to earn a medical degree. No doctor would help her become established as a recognized physician, so Elizabeth decided to give a series of medical lectures. With these lectures she hoped to create enough interest amongst the women of New York to begin a medical practice. This reprint is a compilation of the six lectures – based on general hygiene, preventative medicine, fresh air, and cleanliness. The lectures created quite a sensation and it was years later before the natural laws of health and exercise were to find their place in everyday life. “I think my writings belong in the year 1998...”

She was soon setting up her own practice. She would live to see 7,000 women receive their doctorates as physicians and surgeons in America, just fifty years after she was denied entrance into 25 different medical schools. In 1906, at the age of eight-five years, she visited the New York Infirmary which she had worked so hard to establish. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell has been acknowledged in history as a champion in her time, overcoming prejudices and social ignorance’s to open the field of medicine to women.