Elizabeth Blackwell Quotes

Love, Hope, and Reverence are realities of a different order from the senses, but they are positive and constant facts, always active, always working out mighty changes in human life.

Elizabeth Blackwell, “with a very slender purse and few introductions of any value,” found herself in the “unknown world” of Paris. What made her situation different from that of other American visitors was her profession. She was a doctor—the first American woman to have become a doctor.

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.

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

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

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

...I awoke with a renewed understanding of why it is wise to retire to bed come nightfall. For evil thoughts take strength from the dark, while hope thrives in the light.

I am not the sort of person about whom stories are told. Those of humble birth suffer their heartbreaks and celebrate their triumphs unnoticed by the bards, leaving no trave in the fables of their time.

It is perhaps fortunate that Sylvia was oblivious to the commotion behind the scenes. Apparently, Henry O. Teltscher had written a letter to Betsy Talbot Blackwell, warning her that one of her guest editors was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

In 1879, Massachusetts allow women to vote in school elections. Lucy Stone went to register, but when she discovered that she would have to sign as Mr.s Blackwell, she refused, and so forfeited her opportunity to vote. Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony were delighted. Mr.s Stanton wrote to Mrs. Stone : "Nothing has been done in the woman's rights movement for some time that so rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a woman's right to her name." Susan Anthony wrote that she "rejoiced that you have declared, by actual doing, that a woman has a name, and may retain it throughout her life." Some women in the movement disapproved, however, and wrote to tell her so. She replied that "A thousand times more opposition was made to a woman's claim to speak in public," and continued to use the name of Lucy Stone for the rest of her life. Those who followed her example were called "Lucy Stoners." But in spite of Lucy Stone and the Lucy Stoners, the law has been slow to acknowledge the right of a woman to her own name. More than a hundred years later, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court would uphold an Alabama law which required a woman to use her husband's name.

Every great legend is at its heart a tale of innocence lost, and perhaps that was the role I was destined to play.

In her eyes I saw the pain that comes from regrets that will never be lifted.

Most saw those walls as protection from danger, but I had recognized, somewhere deep in my soul, that not all threats came from without.

Do not be fooled by the fine manners. At court, enemies hide in plain sight.

But happiness, fleeting by nature, is often savored only after it has flown.

reached. Rows of wooden shacks lined a single,

It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they might their pre-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon. I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky ; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered with that circular layer - abominable disc! - of oleaginous nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that surrounds the truffle bedecked pate  de  foie gras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine o'clock breakfasts.

Whatever such rites entailed, the madness of Dionysus was widely accepted as a religious practice. Indeed, it was one of the few ways women were able to obtain a measure of freedom in an otherwise limited public sphere.   Was

scared me. Before I learned what it really means to live with ghosts. Had the dream expressed an unconscious wish? I thought Lakecrest and I had come to a truce, that my feelings had dulled with time. Maybe I still hated it—more than I’d ever admit. I made my way slowly down the hall, avoiding the squeakiest floorboards. I peeked into Stella’s room, which was dimly illuminated by a night-light in the shape of a twirling ballerina. My daughter