MODERN HISTORY

Elizabeth Gets Her Dot

Because she is the Colleges’ staff archivist, Charlotte Hegyi doubles as the unofficial custodian of the legacy of Elizabeth Blackwell, who, as everyone knows, became Amerca’s first M.D. when she graduated from Geneva Medical College in 1849. Because Geneva Medical was later part of Hobart, the Colleges’ archives hold a large collection on Blackwell. And because the world won’t forget Blackwell, Hegyi’s professional life is consumed, in part, by answering requests for information on this pioneer.

The highest percentage of requests come from school children. The number varies, “depending on when the history day projects are scheduled in various parts of the country,” Hegyi says. “In September, I had six requests from middle school-aged children.

“Requests from adults can range from two or three yearly, or none,” she adds. “Some have been from as far away as England.”

It’s not surprising, then, to find that browsers of the Hobart and William Smith website frequently wend their way into the site while searching out “Elizabeth Blackwell.” Among first-hit pages within www.hws.edu, the Colleges’ humble Elizabeth Blackwell page has ordinarily ranked alongside “Hobart lacrosse” in popularity.

However, the Colleges’ Blackwell page is humble no more. Shortly before her graduation last June, Sharon Bowen ’00 helped bring Elizabeth Blackwell closer to the world. Bowen, an honors major in English and environmental studies, also spent nearly four years as a student worker; by the time she graduated, she was assistant webmaster of the HWS site. Her final project as such was to create a whole site devoted to Blackwell. The result, www.hws.edu/blackwell/, went on-line recently.

The new website, owned and operated by Hobart and William Smith, is already the world’s largest on-line repository of information about Blackwell, and is intended to grow significantly larger during its first year of availability. Right now, it contains a biography of Blackwell, links to contemporary articles, a few of the historic artifacts in the HWS archives, and information about the Colleges’ Elizabeth Blackwell Award.

The links to contemporary articles demonstrate how the site (whose dot-net URL places it at the hub of worldwide on-line information about Blackwell) will begin to reflect a larger community of views about this significant historic figure. One link, for example, to the Alumni Journal of a nearby medical college, offers versions of the Blackwell story in which Elizabeth was admitted to Hobart as a sort of prank, and in which her attendance was suffered more than celebrated!

Over time, the Colleges hope to add more of the artifacts that are housed in their archives—on-line versions of the same materials Hegyi now sends out manually.

As the author of Elizabeth Blackwell’s first website, Bowen, who now works in San Francisco as a web coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency, has gotten her own sampling of the demand for information on America’s first female doctor. “Since my e-mail address is listed as the editor of the Blackwell site,” she says, “I receive requests every now and again for any sort of information I can give them, or websites, or whatever. Usually the requests appear to be written by 10- or 11-year-olds, but the ‘reply-to’ address is from Ms. Flanigan or some other teacherly type.” Until now, Bowen has pointed these inquirers back to Charlotte Hegyi.

Now, she believes, the website will answer most grade-school level requests. The only materials still hiding in archives are source materials that serve serious researchers only—things that “aren’t really all that relevant to a fifth-grade project about the first female medical doctor.” Although even for the serious researcher, a new first stop along the trail is www.hws.edu/blackwell/. —Dana Cooke