Images from Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890).

One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.

Jacob Riis, one of the earliest and most famous practitioners of the “muckraking”-style of journalism, was born in Denmark on May 3, 1849; he immigrated to New York in 1870, where he was able to experience first-hand the terrible conditions of overcrowded, disease-ridden city slums. His influential photojournalism publication (and later book) How the Other Half Lives helped expose to the American public these conditions. Theodore Roosevelt, at the time a New York City police commissioner, met Riis in 1894 and, according to Riis’s autobiography, was deeply affected by his book. The future governor of New York and later president called Riis “the most useful citizen of New York”.

On January 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first ever American woman to graduate from medical school. Actually born in Bristol, England, Blackwell’s parents were strong proponents of abolition, which probably inspired her own later social defiance. As there were no precedents in allowing women into medical school in the United States, and no history of American women physicians, Blackwell had no idea how to actually apply. Undaunted by the challenge, she still submitted applications to all the medical schools in New York and Pennsylvania. 

She was finally admitted to Geneva Medical School, in New York, because the question of her acceptance was put to a vote by the faculty. The male student body, thinking her application was a joke, decided to all vote “yes”, and so Elizabeth Blackwell entered medical school, to the horror of her new classmates. In 1849, she became the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. Her significance did not end there, however.

During the 1850s, she and her sister Emily Blackwell (also a medical school graduate) set up the Women’s Central Relief Association, which, during the Civil War, inspired the creation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. After the war, she co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women. Throughout her life, she was dedicated to abolitionism, women’s rights, and the education of women in the medical field. Said Blackwell of her own role as a pioneer in the field:

“It is not easy to be a pioneer - but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.”

If she were alive today, she would be proud to hear that 60% of all medical students in the United States are now female.