Elizabeth Blackwell

• “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.”

• “In carrying on the grand work of improving national health, extirpating loathsome disease, discovering and removing the causes of disease, the distinction must be carefully drawn between the object to be accomplished and the means by which it shall be attained. The object is a grand one; the method of accomplishing it must be equally so, i.e., it must be guided by moral principle.”

• “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.”

• “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.”

• “A serious difficulty in understanding how to educate and regulate the relations of sex arises from the fact that it is the relation of two equal but distinct halves of the human race, and exists in the dual form—male and female. Unless the distinctive characteristics and requirements of each of these equal halves are fully understood, the relation between them cannot be satisfactory.”

• “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.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.