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The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honourable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.

— Elizabeth Blackwell Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895)

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More quotes by Elizabeth Blackwell

For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.

Medicine and Morality (1881)

The subject of love is always of the most absorbing interest to the younger and more active portion of a people; sexual passion, in its ennobling or debasing form, exercises irresistible attraction.

Essays in Medical Sociology (1899)

I am prepared for this. Prejudice is more violent the blinder it is...a work of the ages cannot be hindered by individual feeling. A hundred years hence women will not be what they are now.

Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895)

If an idea, I reasoned, were really a valuable one, there must be some way of realising it. The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed great attraction for me.

Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895)

The great importance to the nation of the prevalence of a high standard of morality in the body of the Medical Profession is evident from the confidential character of the services they are called on to perform. Very few are investigators or experimenters. The great majority become the trusted friends of the family in its time of greatest weakness and need.

Medicine and Morality (1881)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Elizabeth Blackwell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.