03/12/2026
Join us for Born at Duke Homestead every Saturday this month! We'll be discussing 19th century birth, motherhood, midwifery, and medicine.
Although women have long cared for the sick and treated illness and injury, medical schools historically excluded women from the training and prestige of a medical education.
In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, from Geneva Medical College in New York. Her doctoral thesis, published the same year, discussed typhoid fever. Nine years later, at Duke Homestead, that same disease would kill Artelia Roney Duke and her stepson, Sidney.
Blackwell spent most of her career not practicing medicine herself, but rather advocating for women who wanted to become doctors. In the late 1800s, more and more American medical schools began admitting women students.
Duke University School of Medicine was established by a gift from James Buchanan Duke, Artelia’s son, who himself was born at Duke Homestead. Its inaugural class in 1929 included four women.
Image credit: Elizabeth Blackwell, Ship Fever. An Inaugural Thesis, submitted for the degree of M. D., at Geneva Medical College, Jan. 1849. Buffalo Medical Journal and Monthly Review 4, no. 9 (February 1849): 523–531. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103052585&view=1up&seq=535.
