The first female physician in the United States initially found medicine repulsive. Elizabeth Blackwell couldn’t stand the sight of disease, but when a dying friend told her that her suffering would have been more bearable under a female doctor’s care, Blackwell’s moral-crusade upbringing overrode her distaste, and she set out to break open a profession whose gatekeepers refused to hand her, in their words, “a stick to break our heads with.”

This episode follows the admission that happened as a frat-house joke, when 150 male students unanimously voted her in assuming she’d never show, through the typhus wards of Blockley Almshouse and a graduation where the dean bowed. It also confronts the messy contradictions: her rejection of germ theory, the strange and controlling household she kept, and the book about female desire so threatening that a publisher physically destroyed the proofs.

• A crusade, not a calling: the dying friend’s words that overrode her disgust for medicine
• The joke vote at Geneva Medical College, and the woman who walked through the door anyway
• Typhus, syphilis wards, and a radical thesis linking health to social conditions
• The imperfect pioneer: germ theory rejected, an adopted daughter kept as servant, allies alienated
• The book they smashed the presses to stop: which ideas the 1800s found truly dangerous