13. Elizabeth Blackwell Created the National Health Society in the United Kingdom
When Elizabeth Blackwell was a child in the 1800s, a close family friend became terminally ill and claimed that female doctors would be able to provide better care than the male doctors that dominated the United States. That encounter made her determined to become a physician. When she applied to medical schools, all but one rejected her on the basis of her gender. However, Geneva Medical College accepted her as a joke, not believing that a woman would seriously enter the medical field. After enduring two years of harassment for being a female student, she became the first woman doctor to graduate from a medical school in the United States.
Elizabeth frequently traveled between the United States and her native England, where she raised money to build an infirmary in New York. While in England – where she was also one of the only female doctors – she created the National Health Society to advocate for good hygiene and preventative medicine. Blackwell also established an all-women medical school to go with the infirmary she had built. As a doctor, Blackwell also advocated for social reform, in areas from the abolition of prostitution to enabling more women to take up the medical profession by being accepted into medical schools.