On the first Sunday in November 1849, Elizabeth was working upstairs in La Maternité’s infirmary, trying to ignore what felt like “a little grain of sand, as it were, in one eye.” She was too busy to attend to it, and her mind shied away from its probable cause.
In the predawn dimness that morning, she had been making the rounds of the newborns. One of them was suffering from purulent ophthalmia, an aggressive form of conjunctivitis contracted when an infant passes through the birth canal of a woman infected with gonorrhea. As she washed the tiny affected eye, the contaminated liquid splashed into Elizabeth’s face. By evening her left eye was swollen, and when she woke the next morning, the lids were stuck together with gummy discharge.
Elizabeth requested leave to retreat to Anna’s new rooms on the rue de Fleurus until the eye was better, but such coddling was beyond the rights of the élèves. She then sought the opinion of Hippolyte Blot, who wasted no time confining her to a bed in the students’ infirmary. It was soon clear that both eyes were compromised. Today, though the danger of such an infection eating through the cornea is taken seriously, gonorrheal conjunctivitis is easily treated with antibiotics. In 1849 it was cause for profound concern. Though he kept his fears to himself, Blot knew that his friend was in real danger of losing her sight.
Hippolyte Blot and the faithful Clarisse Mallet made Elizabeth their highest priority, taking turns by her side for three days. It was fortunate that Elizabeth felt so warmly toward her attendants, because the treatments to which they subjected her were torture. They cauterized her eyelids. They syringed her eyes with the medicated eyewash known as collyrium; a pharmacopeia of the period mentions everything from rosewater to ammonia to sulfuric acid as possible ingredients. They applied leeches to her temples; they painted her forehead with mercury and hellebore; they administered mustard plasters, purgatives, ointments of belladonna and opium. Elizabeth lived on water and broth, her eyes enormously swollen, her sleep interrupted every two hours as Blot peeled away the opaque membrane forming over the more severely affected left cornea. It was all very far from the cold-water-and-fresh-air regimen Elizabeth preferred, which in this case was probably lucky. Had she been in any position to direct her own treatment, her future as a physician might have ended in Paris.
ANNA BLACKWELL.
COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, MANUSCRIPT DIVISION, BLACKWELL FAMILY PAPERS
Anna received unprecedented permission to visit Elizabeth three times a day. The patient appreciated her sisterly attentions, but Anna was not a natural caregiver. “For the first few days after her illness began I wept almost the entire time,” she wrote. “The next few days I spent in something very like swearing, & up to the present time have indulged in an equal amount of both.” She informed the rest of the Blackwells, with a telling error, that Elizabeth had contracted “prurient” rather than “purulent” ophthalmia, and bemoaned “the great laws of solidarity that so sternly link us all in one, & so frequently make the noble & the good share in the penalties of the ignoble & the evil”—aggrieved that virtuous Elizabeth had been laid low by her degenerate patients.
Though she was grateful for the special care her sister was receiving, Anna flew straight to Baron du Potet for advice and was soon adding her own treatments to the regimen, giving the “magnetic influence” as much credit for Elizabeth’s progress as the devoted efforts of the hospital staff. “I have frequently found her in such excruciating pain that speech was impossible, & a paroxysm of nervous distress & pent-up feelings forcing her from her fortitude & making her weep bitterly,” Anna wrote. “In five minutes, setting my whole soul into the effort, I have had her sleeping quietly, unconscious of pain.” Whether animal magnetism was imaginary or not, the comforting presence of an older sister, her soothing touch, and the cutlets and fruit pies that Anna brought to supplement the hospital fare were powerful positive forces—both for Elizabeth’s health and for Anna’s own sense of purpose, much as she might bemoan her own martyrdom. “I have, indeed, lost again almost all the flesh I had gained of late, in consequence of this outlay of vitality,” Anna wrote. Thank goodness for du Potet, she insisted, “without whose constant aid I could not have borne a tithe of all this fatigue & anxiety, & the exhaustion which follows my constant action upon poor E’s eye.”
What she lacked in unflappability, Anna made up in journalistic gusto. Elizabeth’s left eye looked nightmarish, and Anna did not spare the home folks. Much depended on the integrity of the cornea, for, Anna explained, “if the portion mortified should suddenly detach itself, the probability is that the eye would at once empty itself through the hole.” She seemed at least as fascinated by Elizabeth’s condition as she was horrified: “The pupil presents, just now, the appearance of one of those little misshapen blackberries of three granulations, & half-dried-up, that one sees so often on some scrubby little bush; if you can fancy such a one in dull-looking lead, you have just the appearance of this poor eye.” Scar tissue on the surface of the cornea had to be cauterized repeatedly so as not to abrade the underside of the eyelid.
Throughout the ordeal Elizabeth maintained a superhuman degree of stoicism. For a woman who hid her own ailments, the situation was a particularly exquisite misery: not only was she in unimaginable pain, but her curtained sickbed stood in the middle of her own workplace, with her colleagues witness to every aspect of her helpless plight. Their tearful concern was not always easy to bear. “She is even sometimes almost tormented by the great number of little kindly-meant visits,” Anna wrote of the midwives’ attentions. “Great is the regret expressed on all sides that she should have missed such a ‘jolie opération’; such a ‘cas interessant.’ ” The enforced idleness was maddening, and beneath it lay the terrible fear that she would never be able to see an interesting case again.
Between agonizing treatments, Elizabeth remained relentlessly optimistic. “There never surely was a case of this disease round which such perfectly admirable conditions could have been united,” she declared, grateful for Monsieur Blot’s tireless attention and Mademoiselle Mallet’s deft fingers. She insisted that she could feel her eye “working & pumping & setting things to rights.” This confidence, however, was based at least partly on ignorance. “We do our utmost,” Anna reported, “to keep her from suspecting the alarms & anxieties which any little change of symptoms creates.”
After three weeks of darkness and pain, Elizabeth’s less affected right eye began to clear, and her confinement to ease. One of her first acts was a gift for the tireless Blot, who would soon leave La Maternité to open his own practice. With Anna’s help, she purchased a pair of lamps for his new consulting rooms, which sent Blot into an ecstasy of gratitude he could express only obliquely, as the institution frowned on personal interactions between an attending physician and a student, even when the student had a medical degree herself. “I do admire his delicate conscientiousness!” Elizabeth exclaimed. His solicitousness was a powerful medicine for Elizabeth’s self-regard, if not her actual vision. “He admired my braid of long hair,” she wrote, “[and] wondered how fingers without eyes could arrange anything so beautifully regular.”
At the end of December, Elizabeth dressed for the first time since the injury, and with her eye bandaged and her head swathed in a veil, she slipped from the door of La Maternité into a waiting carriage. The hospital register records her departure en congé illimité: on unlimited leave, a designation that would keep her record free from the stain of failure, even as it closed this particular door firmly behind her. (In her memoir, Elizabeth made it seem as if she were ill in the hospital for only a few weeks when in fact it was closer to two months. She always hated to admit physical weakness.)
It was only a few minutes to Anna’s rooms on the rue de Fleurus, opposite the western gate of the Jardin du Luxembourg, but even that was exhausting. Anna led Elizabeth upstairs, where she could no longer make out the details of the ceiling ornaments and the tasteful wallpaper, nor admire the view. “I felt very weak, and laughed hysterically the whole evening,” Elizabeth confided to her journal, writing mostly by feel. She could discern the light of a lamp “as through thick mist,” and tell when a hand was passed in front of her face but not much more—and that was with her good eye.
It would be the middle of January before she was able to venture outside on Anna’s arm, heavily veiled in black lace and stepping carefully over a crust of frozen snow through the gates of the park. “I felt as if I could defy the cold of Siberia & rejoiced in every breath of the fresh sweet air,” she exulted, her writing larger and looser than before. “I never smelt a summer nosegay of more soul rejoicing odour.” Inactivity was taking a toll on her health. “I never was very fat you know, but now I am ridiculously thin,” she wrote. “The anatomy of my neck is very unpleasantly displayed.”
Elizabeth’s conviction that God was her most faithful colleague never faltered. “I suffered according to a grand & beautiful law, that the highest must suffer for the sins of the lowest,” she wrote, implying somewhat startlingly that her sufferings, Christ-like, would help to redeem humanity. Her belief that God was more powerful than anything medical science could offer was entirely explicit. “He fills me with a spirit of hope & confidence, that reacts continually against the disease & which will finally cure the eye.” Given the limited pharmacopeia of 1849, belief in God’s support remained a powerful drug.
The admiration of Elizabeth’s mortal allies reinforced her sense of exalted suffering. Dubois, the obstetrics professor, put his praise in writing, affirming that Elizabeth had distinguished herself by “son excellente conduite, son assiduité, son zèle, son intelligence et son instruction,” and that her departure from La Maternité had taken place “à mon grand regret.” His words were a comfort. “I am enabled by my sickness to go out in a halo of glorification,” she wrote, insisting that she would be resuming her studies “as soon as I can go about without running into people” and celebrating the first anniversary of her medical school graduation with a glass of sweet Frontignan. Anna, who could be laid low by a passing cloud, marveled at her sister’s optimism in the face of catastrophe, and brother Sam deemed her “a real sororal gem in the pinchbeck* family ring.” Hippolyte Blot wrote a fulsome letter to the Blackwells extolling “son noble caractère, sa résignation, sa fermeté, son courage.” Marian, clear-sighted as usual, was the only one to leaven her praise with candor. “I regard her course as a noble one, and I feel proud that woman should conquer so many obstacles and achieve what she has done,” she wrote. But: “Elizabeth is a peculiar person. She does not please everyone.”
Emily rejoiced with her family in the restoration of Elizabeth’s health. Cozy as it was to gather hearthside for evenings of literary appreciation with her mother and siblings in Cincinnati— the family had just read Currer Bell’s† Shirley, which they deemed superior to his Jane Eyre—Emily, now twenty-three, was ready to move forward. In the new year of 1850, she received a letter from Elizabeth’s former employer in Henderson, Kentucky, inviting Emily to fill the same teaching position. If medical school was truly in her sights, she needed to earn some money.
A month later she was on her way to Henderson, where she moved into the same room that had been Elizabeth’s six years earlier. Elizabeth blessed the decision with a mixture of honest enthusiasm and older-sister superiority. “Everyone will be prepared to meet her pleasantly for my sake, & she will be more popular than I was, for I awed the people a little too much, I kept so strictly to myself & my books,” she wrote. “I might have done more good, if I had opened to the kind feeling that every where awaited me.” It was heartening to see Emily take her first step toward the partnership Elizabeth imagined. “Oh, I do hope Emily will succeed & begin to lay up a little fortune,” she exclaimed. From her convalescence in Paris, she wrote letters of encouragement and advice—bossy but no less heartfelt—to Emily in Henderson.
Emily tackled her new surroundings with the same single-mindedness as her sister before her. Forewarned by Elizabeth’s experience, she was more philosophical about Henderson’s discomforts. Teaching took up six or seven hours each day, but otherwise her time was her own, to fill with study and walks in the woods. She brought home armfuls of cherry blossom and wished she had a book to help her identify the crimson songbirds that perched in the locust trees outside her window. The only real detractors were an aggressive mosquito population and too much solitude. “I think I never lived so entirely without talking in my life,” she wrote, checking off another Sunday with some relief. Henry cheered her on with cheeky letters, signing off, “Farewell embryo Esculapius! & believe me yours ever, Phosphate of Lime coated with Gelatine & muscular tissue.” A year older than Emily, he could tease her medical ambitions in a way he wouldn’t dare with Elizabeth.
Like her sister before her, Emily found it unnerving to live among slave owners. But where Elizabeth—who had spent her teenage years steeped in the rhetoric of famous abolitionists—had felt called to act, Emily, only ten when she tagged along to the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, did not. She felt like a trespasser in the “infernal regions” when she entered the kitchen, full of Black people speaking “strange gibberish,” and was equally alienated from the whites who benefited from their labor. “It seems to me the trouble the slaves give them is almost punishment enough for keeping them,” Emily wrote, “but the people are so lazy that they must have someone to wait on them all the time, and so they think it would be impossible to have a free state.” As judgmental as Elizabeth, but without the same adamantine idealism, she kept to herself and left the citizens of Henderson to their own opinions.
Writing from Paris, Elizabeth exhorted Emily to be careful. “I can imagine you well in my old room, with its half window,” she wrote. “But you do wrong to study much at night, for your eyes have a tendency to inflame—& for pity’s sake Emily, do not injure them.” Elizabeth’s impatience had intensified with the glorious news that, thanks to cousin Kenyon’s efforts, she had been granted permission to study at St. Bartholomew’s, the oldest hospital in London, under the aegis of James Paget, who was on his way to renown in surgery and pathology. This was thrilling, both for her own sake and for Emily’s. “Now if I go & make a respectable common-sense impression upon the London M.D.s, I have a full persuasion that they will behave in a respectable common-sense way to my sister, & afford her the simple justice of a medical education,” she wrote. “Here is another motive for getting my eye well—oh little organ, how much you are needed!”
For all Elizabeth’s resolute optimism, however, the eye was not improving. The cornea had thickened and clouded, and whenever she used the healthy eye, the damaged one became swollen and painful. The hope that she might regain its use was receding. “I have been placed in a most difficult strait,” she confided to Emily. “The thought of St. Bartholomew’s hospital, & all the noble work that waits for me to do it, haunted me day & night.” How to free herself from this depressing quandary? She did have one idea, which as usual made perfect sense to her and alarmed everyone else. “My intention is to study Hydropathy for a month or two this summer,” she revealed to Emily. To study it intimately, that is, as a patient of Vincent Priessnitz.
Unlike every other medical mentor Elizabeth had hitherto consulted, Priessnitz had no training. A farmer from the Silesian village of Gräfenberg, near what is now the border of Poland and the Czech Republic, as a teenager he had been injured in a cart accident and told he had little chance of full recovery. Wrapping himself in wet bandages and drinking copious amounts of water, he restored himself to health, and word of his technique spread. He transformed his family’s farmhouse into a water-cure sanatorium, treating his increasingly illustrious patients with plain food, exercise, and water—beverage, shower, bath, compress—and boasting enviable results. Regular medicine was getting Elizabeth nowhere, and cold water and fresh air had helped her in the past. It was time to put this alternative practice to the test.
Hippolyte Blot, who continued to take responsibility for Elizabeth’s care, was appalled. “My kind young physician thinks I am a little crazy to take a long expensive journey & go all alone, to a half savage country, where a peasant takes the place of a physician—but I think I am very wise,” she wrote. “Oh Milly Milly, if in a few months, I could regain my eye & find myself again strong & eager for work, wouldn’t I bless those German mountains till my dying day?”
For this chance she was willing to leave her Paris friends behind—including Blot, whose attentions had expanded from the medical to the social. He often dropped by Anna’s rooms in the evenings, ostensibly for English lessons, though he also enjoyed reading aloud to Elizabeth and Anna such improving texts as Ernest Legouvé’s four-hundred-page L’histoire morale des femmes. “I shall miss him exceedingly when I leave, for there is a most affectionate sympathy between us,” Elizabeth wrote. “But a reformer’s life is not a garden of roses.”
Elizabeth had always preferred to play the hero rather than the damsel in distress. Galloping off to continue her quest at Gräfenberg was vastly preferable to the possibility that Blot’s admiration might twist into pity for her disfigurement. To her mother’s brother Charles, a military man, she wrote, “I beg Uncle to feel quite sure that a brave soldier’s niece will never disgrace the Colours she fights under, but will be proud of the wounds gained in a great Cause, and resolve more strongly than ever to ‘conquer or die.’ ”
Few women in 1850, even if in perfect health, would have undertaken a solo journey of more than eight hundred miles via rail and carriage across the breadth of Europe. Elizabeth—gaunt, unsteady, half-blind, and alone—left Paris on June 16 and made the journey in six days, via Brussels, Cologne, Hanover, and Berlin. Her journal, scrawled in a jolting conveyance, is a triumph of will over discomfort: disjointed entries in an awkward, looping script written first in pencil and gone over later in ink; lines that weave out of horizontal; capital letters leaning drunkenly, their flourishes askew. In no mood to enjoy the view, she wrote her impressions in telegraphic bursts: “disappointed in the Rhine . . . country too flat . . . round Magdeburg duller & duller.”
Ever in search of the ideal, she paused in her flight long enough to enjoy the work of old masters in Berlin, allowing herself a moment to indulge in pure feeling, not to mention gratitude at having preserved at least partial sight. In her rapturous descriptions of the paintings that held her gaze, she betrayed something of the yearnings she rarely allowed to surface. There was Titian’s Girl with a Platter of Fruit, a portrait of the artist’s daughter, full-figured, all creamy skin and rich brocade; and a more contemporary self-portrait by Angelica Kauffmann, looking directly at the viewer with self-possessed wit—both images of arresting, beautiful women, blooming with the kind of health Elizabeth had lost, attracting her in a way she could not articulate. But Elizabeth’s favorite was perhaps the most telling: Correggio’s Io Embraced by Jupiter.
The most beautiful picture I ever saw—her head thrown back, the face expressive of divine bliss, ecstasy superhuman thrilling in every fibre, such ecstasy as only the embrace of a deity could give—the figure is exquisite in every way—the rounded limbs glow with soft light—his figure is dark & cloudy, veiled to the sight. . . . It is too beautiful to be called voluptuous—yet it is the most powerful representation of the love sentiment in a woman that I have ever seen.
In the painting, Io is a monumental nude, her lips parted in orgasmic passion, while Jupiter is barely discernible as a cloud of sooty vapor, divine love unburdened by threatening flesh. It is an image of sexual pleasure without carnality and without context, without submission or pain or disease or pregnancy; an otherworldly love, as idealized and impossible as Elizabeth’s attraction to Hippolyte Blot would forever remain.
“I wrote to him,” Elizabeth confided to her journal. “How strongly my life turns to him, & yet that terrible suffering has put a distance between us, that I fear nothing can remove.” Both her pioneering ambition and her emotional awkwardness made any thought of intimacy impossible. When Blot announced his marriage less than a year later, she would send warm congratulations. For now, as she stood before Correggio’s sensual masterpiece, it was consoling to imagine that such bliss was something “only the embrace of a deity could give.”
Certainly bliss was not to be found at Gräfenberg. If Elizabeth had expected the wild sublime, she found only smooth-sided slopes, cultivated nearly to the peaks and dotted with tame white cottages. She had little money and even less German. At a loss, she took a hotel room, wrote a note to Vincent Priessnitz, and sat down to wait, “feeling decidedly blue.”
In a gratifyingly short time, the door opened, and the fifty-year-old Priessnitz himself, “the High Priest of water,” stood before her. With his pale blue eyes, weather-beaten features, wiry frame, and homespun clothing, he struck her immediately as “honest & good.” He looked her up and down and declared that he could restore her vitality in six weeks, without doing her fragile eye any harm. She had heard that his establishment was full, but he reassured her. “You can come, child,” he insisted. “Come this afternoon, and bring your things with you.”
The plainness of the Gräfenberg sanatorium was part of its mystique. Priessnitz had expanded his farmhouse into an enormous five-storied white edifice with a stream rushing beneath, “something like one of our cotton manufactories,” wrote Elizabeth, with room to accommodate and process, factory-like, hundreds of patients at a time. Though the ear might be charmed by the constant applause of rushing water, the nose wrinkled at the proximity of cows and the ubiquity of sodden wool blankets and linens stretched out to dry. Elizabeth was shown to the only available room, a sky-lit garret under the rafters with a straw-filled wooden bedstead and a green earthenware bowl atop the low bureau. “I must have looked rather dismayed,” Elizabeth wrote, “for the girl hastened to inform me, that I had an Italian count & countess with their son & daughter for next-door neighbors.” When the bell rang for the evening meal, Elizabeth found herself in a vast dining hall, surrounded by patients in formal dress, the ladies with their hair done up in flowers and curls, jewels sparkling on wide expanses of décolletage. Their daunting finery stood in odd contrast to the dismaying fare: a hard brown loaf “so sour that I could hardly swallow it.” The fresh milk was some consolation. Exhausted and unable to comprehend the merry German chatter all around her, she retreated to her spartan room.
The cure began at six o’clock the next morning, with Priessnitz himself supervising the first treatment. To begin, there was “packing”: a swaddling of the patient, first in a wet sheet, then in thick blankets and eiderdown, to induce sweating. This was followed by a series of cold-water baths, further wrapping in wet bandages, and glasses of water to drink. At noon the protocol featured an abreibung, a vigorous rubdown with wet sheets, followed by a sitz bath and more wet bandages; this process was repeated at four. In the hours between treatments, everyone took to the mountains.
Gräfenberg agreed with Elizabeth—at least according to her letters. “Everybody seems to have a good appetite—my own is ravenous,” she wrote to the family. “Out all day in the open air, rambling over these wide hills, stimulated by the wind & the abundant cold water, I find myself suddenly in strong vigorous health, & the idea of sickness out here, seems a fable.” Flowers and trickling springs and the call of the cuckoo made the landscape lovely, if not sublime, and she even made a friend: a handsome young American suffering from near-total blindness, who provided her efficiently with flattering male attention, a warm “home feeling,” and the satisfaction of helping someone even more afflicted than herself. The only irritant she mentioned was her constant sense of sartorial inadequacy. “I find I have brought altogether too small a wardrobe for the demands of the place,” a deficiency that exacerbated her tendency to shun the company of others.
To her journal, Elizabeth told a different tale. “The abreibung deadens my fingers, the sitz bath gives me colic, the wet bandages impede digestion,” she wrote. “Tonight I went to bed with quite a feverish attack, which gave me unpleasant dreams the whole night.” In her autobiography decades later, Elizabeth dispatched her final and devastating setback in a few lines: the rugged regimen proved “too stimulating,” a “violent attack of inflammation supervened,” and by the beginning of August, she had returned “with great difficulty” to Paris, in pain and largely unable to see. On August 15, 1850, the noted ophthalmologist Louis-Auguste Desmarres operated to remove what remained of her left eye and fitted her for a glass prosthetic. Ether had been used as an anesthetic for the first time in 1846; chloroform in 1847. Both were gaining in acceptance, but not all surgeons had adopted them. Dr. Desmarres might have used either one—or neither.
The loss of her eye ended any possibility that Elizabeth would become a surgeon, though her resolve to practice medicine remained undimmed. Alone in a Paris boardinghouse, she put her own surgery behind her and focused on the next chapter. “It is a sad business—she has suffered horribly,” wrote Anna, who had herself fled the midsummer heat for the suburb of St. Cloud, sighing, “I am horribly tired just now, & suffering from the fatigue & excitement of other people’s affairs.” Elizabeth, her health rebounding rapidly, did not miss her sister’s lugubrious company. It was time to return to London and claim the opportunity that had been waiting since May: continuing her studies at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
From Cincinnati, brother Sam expressed his less self-absorbed support. “That poor only eye,” he wrote. “Heaven preserve it, it is very valuable now.”
* A copper-zinc alloy meant to look like gold and used in costume jewelry.
† In 1850 the world knew Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë only by their pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.