Events

Elizabeth Blackwell graduated first in her class from Geneva Medical College in upstate New York on January 23, 1849, becoming the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. She had been rejected by every major medical school in the country—at least 29 institutions turned her away before Geneva''s all-male student body voted to admit her, reportedly as a joke. Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, in 1821 and emigrated to the United States with her family as a child. The idea of pursuing medicine came from a dying friend who told her she might have been spared the worst indignities of her illness had her physician been a woman. Blackwell initially found the idea repugnant—she later wrote that she "hated everything connected with the body"—but the challenge itself drew her in. She studied privately with sympathetic physicians and saved money by teaching school. At Geneva, Blackwell endured social ostracism from the town''s women, who crossed the street to avoid her, and stiff resistance from some faculty. She was initially barred from classroom demonstrations involving the reproductive system. But her academic performance was undeniable. When she graduated at the top of her class, the dean placed her thesis on the topic of typhus in the college library, and even skeptical professors acknowledged her ability. After graduation, Blackwell trained in Paris and London, losing sight in one eye after contracting ophthalmia neonatorum from a patient. Returning to New York, she found that no hospital would hire her and no landlord would rent her office space. She responded by founding the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in 1857, staffed entirely by women. The institution trained a generation of female physicians. Blackwell later co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, opening the profession on both sides of the Atlantic to those who had been told the practice of medicine was beyond their nature.

Seventeen of the Soviet Union''s most prominent Old Bolsheviks sat in the dock at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow, accused of conspiring with Leon Trotsky, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan to overthrow the Soviet state. The second Moscow Show Trial, which opened on January 23, 1937, was Joseph Stalin''s most elaborate piece of political theater—a spectacle designed to justify the elimination of everyone who might challenge his absolute power. The defendants included Karl Radek, a brilliant journalist and propagandist; Yuri Piatakov, deputy commissar of heavy industry; and Grigory Sokolnikov, a former finance commissar. All had been loyal Bolsheviks who had participated in the 1917 Revolution and served the Soviet government for decades. Under interrogation by the NKVD secret police, they had been broken through sleep deprivation, threats against their families, and physical torture, and they now delivered carefully rehearsed confessions to absurd crimes. The confessions were staggering in their implausibility. Piatakov claimed he had flown secretly to Oslo to meet Trotsky, a trip later disproven when Norwegian authorities confirmed no such flight had landed. Radek, who retained enough wit to occasionally veer from the script, told the court he was guilty of "not having been a genuine accomplice" but was found guilty nonetheless. Foreign journalists who attended the trial were divided—some believed the confessions, while others recognized the choreography of state terror. Thirteen of the seventeen defendants were sentenced to death and shot. Radek and Sokolnikov received prison sentences but were later killed in custody. The Trial of the Seventeen was the middle act of the Great Purge, which between 1936 and 1938 consumed an estimated 750,000 executions and millions of imprisonments. Stalin eliminated virtually the entire generation of revolutionaries who had built the Soviet Union alongside Lenin, replacing them with a terrified bureaucracy whose only qualification was unquestioning obedience.