Elizabeth Blackwell, born in 1821, was the first woman
doctor in the United States. She was also the first woman to be entered into the
Physicians’ Register in the UK.

She was born in Bristol, England in 1821. At that time it was
not common for girls to receive a proper education. They were taught good
manners and useful household and social skills. They were not considered as
anything more than homemakers. Elizabeth Blackwell’s father, Samuel Blackwell,
had different views. He thought girls should receive the same education as boys.
Elizabeth, her four sisters and her four brothers all received the same,
extensive education.

Samuel Blackwell was against the Church in England. He also
suffered business losses. He decided that he should move with his family to
America. In 1832, the family immigrated to America. The entire family became
involved in the abolitionist movement. They even hid escaping slaves in their
home. Samuel Blackwell was unable to make much money. By the time he died, in
1838, there was very little left for his family to live on. Elizabeth, along
with two of her sisters, started a small private school for girls, to help bring
in money.

Elizabeth was interested in becoming a doctor. She was
convinced that women would rather see a female, than a male, about their health
problems. She studied medicine, privately, while teaching. At the same time she
applied to medical school. Over twenty medical schools rejected her. It was
unthinkable for a woman to become a doctor. Elizabeth didn’t give up her
dream, though. Finally, she was accepted by Geneva Medical School, New York, in
1847. It was supposed to be a joke. The male students were asked to vote on
whether she should be allowed in or not. They voted yes because they thought she
could never succeed, and they would teach her a lesson. Elizabeth didn’t see
it that way. She studied hard and graduated first in her class, receiving her
degree in 1849.

She returned to Pennsylvania and worked in the hospitals
there. During that time she became a naturalized US citizen. She wanted to
become a surgeon, and traveled to Paris hoping to train with the great surgeons
there. Again she was refused admission to the medical community. Instead she
enrolled in the Midwifery School. She attended to women and sick infants. She
accidentally infected her own left eye while treating a baby with a severe eye
infection. This resulted in the loss of her eye that was later replaced with a
glass eye. She also lost all hope of becoming a surgeon.

She then moved onto London and trained under Sir James Paget.
All of her training could not get her a job in a private practice in the States.
No man was going to take in a woman associate. Since she couldn’t get into an
established practice she decided to set up her own, with her sister Emily. Emily
was following Elizabeth into medicine. She was having an even harder time than
Elizabeth finding a college that would accept her.

Elizabeth rented a house and set up her private practice in
it. She slowly began to get patients. Two years later she opened a dispensary
for poor women and children in a slum area of Manhattan. Emily eventually
graduated from medial school and joined Elizabeth. Together they opened the New
York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. Many other newly graduate women
doctors did their training there.

In 1958, Elizabeth returned to England. She became the first
woman to be entered on the Physicians’ Register there. She gave lectures on
education reform, and inspired Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to take up medicine.
Garrett Anderson was a pioneer of women doctors in England. She opened a
hospital like the one Elizabeth Blackwell had opened in New York. That hospital
remained open until very recently (about 1980).

Elizabeth returned to America just in time to see the
beginnings of the Civil War. Elizabeth and Emily helped train nurses for the
Union Army. Elizabeth was appointed head of the Sanitary Commission by President
Lincoln. At the beginning of the Civil War very little was understood about
hygiene and how it affected health. Elizabeth was one of the first to understand
how hygiene helped prevent the spread of infection. In 1868 the Women’s
Medical College opened in New York, next to the Infirmary. Elizabeth was
Professor of Hygiene.

She decided that women were well established in American
medical circles and turned her attentions to England, once again. She moved back
to England, becoming a Professor of Gynecology there. She died in 1910, at the
age of 89 in Hastings, England. By the
time she died female doctors were accepted in England and the United States. The
Women’s Medical College had closed as regular colleges were accepting female
students. There were 7,000 female doctors in the States. She had paved the way for them
all!

There
were many different ideas about why colonization was a good thing. The
explorers had to persuade someone to pay for their trips, so they came
up with reasons why it was a good idea. Here are some of the reasons
they gave, including money, culture, and religion. 

Getting Things Cheaply

In the very beginning it was seen as a way to buy things cheaply. Once the
explorers discovered how easily they could overpower the natives of most of the
countries, they decided to take things rather than buy them.

A Market Place for Goods

The colonizers had a lot of goods they wanted to sell. They could produce far
more things than they could sell to their own people. They were always fighting
with the people around them, so they needed to find new people to sell their
things to. They also saw it as a way to give the troublesome poor people jobs.
They could be put to work making things for the expeditions, and things to trade
and use in the “new” countries.

Spreading Religion and Culture

Most of the colonizing countries saw it as their duty to God, to convert the
native people to their religion. They also thought that the natives were
savages, and felt that it was their duty to teach them how to behave
“properly”.

Somewhere to Dump “Extra”
People

There were more people in the European countries than the governments could
handle. The poor people were always causing troubles, wanting food and clothes,
and not wanting to pay taxes. The idea was that the countries could send these
people to the colonies. Since they were poor, they couldn’t afford to pay to go.
They had their ticket paid for them by a trading company. Then they had to work
for the trading company for a number of years, without pay, before they were
free. This was a great way of getting rid of the troublemakers, and at the same
time, a cheap way of setting up the colonies.

Another way of getting rid of people who were considered troublesome, was to
send convicted prisoners to the colonies. The most famous example of this is
Australia. These colonies were called “penal colonies”. Although a few
of the people sent to them were truly criminals, most were just poor people,
accused of doing things like stealing food or clothes for their children.

Building Armies and Navies

The Europeans were a very troublesome lot. They were forever fighting with
one another. Since the colonies had natives, who didn’t want the colonists, they
were going to have to fight. Colonists who had been fighting natives for years
would make very good soldiers.

To get to the colonies they had to use ships, so more ships were built and
more sailors trained. In times of war these ships and sailors could be used to
fight in the Navy.

Glorification of The Country

At the time that these colonies were being founded, the European countries
were all still ruled by Kings and Queens. The Kings and Queens had the final say
on explorations and discoveries, since they paid for them. In order to persuade
them to agree, the explorers told them how many new subjects (citizens) they
would rule over, and how much land they would own. They were a pretty greedy
lot, so they liked the idea.

Greed

If you look at all of the reasons that were given, you can probably see that
the biggest reason was greed. They could buy, or get things cheaply. They could
sell the things they made. They could take exotic woods and stones to build
grand houses and other buildings. They could make themselves more important and
powerful than their neighbors.

Perhaps the spreading of religion and culture were the only reasons not tied
to greed. The colonizers really thought that they were doing something good for
the native people. Even the spreading of religion was tied in some ways to
power. The Europeans were busy fighting about the “true” religion.
Each side thought that more people following their religion would prove that
they were right.

Have you read part #1 A
General Overview ?

Watch out for part#3, coming soon……The Effects of
Colonization

#1 What Are They?

In the last few weeks, community helpers have been in the news a lot.
We have heard stories about firemen, police officers, paramedics, medical personnel
and construction workers. All of them have been helping the community.
Community helpers include many more than these people, though.
To know what a community helper is, first you need to know what a community is.

A community is made up of different groups of people
who live and work together. The community has a specific location
(it is in one place), it has rules and laws that people must follow and
the people work together to solve their problems. The very smallest unit
which could be called a community is you r family, then comes your
neighborhood, and finally the town or city that you live in.
So what is a community helper?

A community helper is anyone in the community who helps others by providing
a service of some kind. The easy ones to think of are the Police Force,
the Fire Service and the Emergency Medical Services. There are many, many
more, though. How many can you think of?

First, think about your own home. Your Mom can be considered a
community helper. In your family it is probably your mom who cooks the
dinner, cleans the house, does the laundry and helps in a thousand different
ways everyday. If no one did those jobs, just imagine what would happen to
your family, it would stop being a community and become a disaster instead.
Not all families do have a Mom, and they are still a community, so who does
all the jobs in those families? Well, there is Dad and Grandma, maybe a
housekeeper or a gardener, a babysitter, older brothers and sisters,
the list goes on and on. Everyone can be a community helper.

Just suppose you clean up your room. It is only your room; you don’t share it with
anyone. Do you think that would make you a community helper? The answer is
not really, because you are helping your Mom and yourself but you are not
helping the whole community. To be a community helper you would have to do
something that helped everyone, so cleaning the living room would make you
a community helper.

Next, let’s think about community helpers in your neighborhood.
There is the mail carrier, the sanitation workers, maybe a school crossing
guard, a baker and of course the emergency services, which include the Fire
Department, Police Department and Emergency Medical Services. Maybe you
have a health center in your neighborhood. If you do then you also have
doctors, nurses and dentists working to help your neighborhood community.

In the biggest community, your town or city, there are many more helpers.
There are lawmakers and government officials.
There are construction crews who help keep the roads under
repair and maintenance crews who fix the streetlights and traffic
signals to keep our streets safe. There are shopkeepers who provide
us with the things we need. There are teachers and janitors in school,
to help us learn in a clean safe place. In restaurants there are chefs
waiters and waitresses who help provide us with a good healthy meal.
There are parking attendants. The list goes on and on. Just about everyone
in the community is a helper in some way. That is what makes a community,
a group of people working together to make a better place for everyone.

From Bartering to Paper Money.

You’ve
probably never thought very much about money. It is just there. When you
want or need something, you simply take some money and pay for it. That
wasn’t always the way things were done, before money was invented people
used to swap things. This was called bartering.

At first, people used to do direct swaps
for what they needed. Supposing you had a lot of corn, but no meat, and the
farmer down the road had a lot of meat but no corn. If that was the case then
you could agree on a fair swap, and swap corn for meat. If you needed meat, but
the farmer already had corn, he might not want any more corn, he may want
something else, perhaps some eggs. If you still wanted the meat, you would have
to find someone who had too many eggs, and wanted some corn. Of course, this
system meant that people spent all their days trying to find someone to swap
with, and they weren’t able to get anything else done. That was when people came
up with a better idea.

Instead of a direct swap of one item for
another people came up with the idea of using one thing to swap for everything
else. This was the beginning of money. At first, it didn’t look much like money.
Different people used different things. Some people used beads or crops, or even
small animals
.
Animals and crops weren’t very practical, since you couldn’t keep them in your
pocket, when you went to the market. The Native Americans used shells, called wampum.
These were very highly decorated and everyone wanted them. That was important,
since if no one wanted them, you wouldn’t be able to swap them for anything.

At the same time as the Americans were
using shells, people in other countries were using lumps of metal. The biggest
problem with a lump of metal was that it was hard to break. How could people
decide what was a fair sized lump for the swap? The Lydian people, who came from
an area of what is now Turkey, came up with the idea to make coins
in about 600 BC. They pressed the metal into flat, round pieces, and different
size coins had differing swapping value. Later they made coins of different
metals, and each type of coin had a different value.

Eventually the use of coins caused
problems, too. It was the same problem as with the animals; the coins were heavy
and difficult to carry around. Scholars think that the Chinese were the first
group of people to come up with the idea of using paper
money. Although paper isn’t worth anything, it is like an IOU letter. The
paper money was bought by paying for it with coins. So a paper note, that cost
20 coins to buy, could be used for buying things, to the value of 20 coins.

This is how money began. We still use
the same system today. Our coins are made of metal, and paper money is worth a
certain amount of coins, and can be swapped for coins at the bank.

Related Links:

The
Minting Process Revealed

 

From Hieroglyphics to the Internet

Each time you use the Internet, you need to read and write. Have you
ever thought about who invented writing, and what the first kind of
writing looked like? You might be very surprised to know that when
writing was first invented, people didn’t use letters like our modern
alphabet at all. They used pictures to show what they meant.

Although
people like to fight about it, most historians agree that the Ancient Egyptians
were the first people to write words. They did this by joining pictures
together. They had two types of writing. One was very fancy, and took a very
long time at school to learn, this was used for religious writing. Only very
important people stayed at school long enough to use the fancy kind of writing.
The other kind was much easier, and was used for making lists, writing journals,
and writing letters. If you were at school in Ancient Egypt, you would probably
do your homework using the easier kind. The fancy kind is called hieroglyphic
and the other kind is called demotic, and looked a little bit more like writing.
The Egyptians liked to write on walls (maybe you could say they invented
graffiti, too) and they also used to write on something called a papyrus. This
was a little bit like paper, but was made from reeds that were pressed together
and dried, to form a thick, hard sheet, that wasn’t very bendy.

The
Egyptians stopped using hieroglyphics and demotics nearly 2,000 years ago, and
gradually people forgot how to read them. Then, in 1799, some French soldiers
found a stone when they were digging in Egypt. They were building a fort in a
place called “Rosetta” and so the stone is called the
Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is sort of like the world’s very first
dictionary.

The
stone had three different types of writing on it. One of the languages was
Greek, and the other two were the two different types of Ancient Egyptian
writing. Scholars realized that all three languages said the same thing. Even
though they couldn’t read the hieroglyphics, they could all read the Greek, so
pretty soon
one of them worked out how to read the hieroglyphics, too. After all, they
were scholars, so they were smart.

Eventually
people invented paper and printing presses, and then lots of books were written.
Then came typewriters, and lastly the computer. With the computer came the
Internet. The Internet is almost like a giant book, full of all sorts of
wonderful things to read, and do, and find out about. You can find out lots more
about hieroglyphics, and you can even
write your name using hieroglyphics.

The Great Pyramid at Giza

The Outside

When people talk about Egyptian pyramids the ones that spring to mind are the pyramids of Giza. Of these, the largest is
known as the Great Pyramid, or the Pyramid of Khufu. Who built it and why? What exactly did it look like?

Although there are pyramids found in other parts of the world, when someone says “pyramid” people usually think of the three Egyptian pyramids that are world famous. The Ancient Egyptians built many pyramids, but these three in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, are the best preserved and the ones we know most about.

The largest of the three was built by King Khufu, otherwise known as King Cheops (pronounced as Key ops). He was called Cheops by the Greeks. His pyramid was the first one to be built at Giza and, being the largest, is known as the Great Pyramid. It was built in about 2,500 B.C. (about 4,500 years ago). It covers an area of 13 acres. Each side is 756 ft long (give or take an inch or two). It was originally 481 ft tall, but has been eroded by sand and wind, and now stands slightly shorter. That makes it about the same height as a forty-story building.

The pyramid was built as a tomb for the King (or Pharaoh as he was known then). He wanted to have a bigger and better tomb than any of his ancestors, so he asked the best architects in the land to design one for him. In those days, as soon as someone became a Pharaoh they started planning their funeral. It seems odd to us today, but for them the funeral was the most important part of their lives (or actually, to be more precise, their deaths!) King Khufu reigned for 23 years, and the pyramid was completed in his lifetime. No one is sure exactly how long it took to build, they are only sure that it took less than 23 years.

Designing the Pyramid

For years the Egyptians built their tombs underground, with a large flat building above them. They looked very much like a large bench. The Ancient Egyptians were very vain, and were always trying to out do everyone else. Someone decided that the bench tombs were plain and boring, so they started to build bigger and grander tombs. These tombs were the very first Egyptian pyramids. Instead of building an underground tomb with one bench on top, they put a series of benches on top, each one smaller than the previous one. It was called a step pyramid. The most famous one isn’t far from the Great Pyramid of Giza, in a place called Saqqara.

From the step pyramid came the true pyramid, like the ones at Giza, made by flattening the sides of the step pyramid, so that there was a gradual slope to the side, rather than the giant steps.

Building the Pyramid

Once a tomb had been designed the next step was to choose a site for it. It couldn’t be just anywhere, so the priests and important people would decide on an auspicious site (just a fancy way of saying lucky). Most of the Pharaoh’s tombs are built on the West side of the Nile, since the sun sets in the West. They believed that you traveled to a New World after you died, and since you traveled towards the darkness, if you started out where the sun set you wouldn’t have as far to go.

The first thing that needed to be done was to clear the sand away until they reached rock beneath the desert. Then the rock had to be flattened out so that the pyramid would be level. Next they marked the area that would be the base of the pyramid, with one side facing each of the main compass points (north, south east and west). This might all sound fairly simple so far, but you have to remember that everything was done by hand; no jackhammers or earthmovers were around in those days. The Ancient Egyptians didn’t have compasses either, but knew the direction by watching the sun and the stars.

Next they needed to get the stones. Some were cut from hills nearby and others were taken from the other side of the Nile. They also took granite and marble from Aswan, in the South of Egypt, to build a cover for the pyramid. Each stone was cut very precisely, and weighed between 21/2 and 5 tons. To build the pyramid they used 2,300,000 blocks of stone. If it took them the whole 23 years to build, that was 273 stones that they had to cut and move every day. If you look at the picture below, it will give you some idea of the size of the blocks.

The stones were transported to the site on wooden sledges on the land, and barges on the river. The river could only be used when it was flooded, which happened twice a year.

Once the stones reached the site they were smoothed to fit exactly with the surrounding ones. They didn’t use mortar or cement to build the pyramid; they just cut the stones so perfectly that they fitted onto each other. Even after all these years, they fit so perfectly together that it is impossible to slide a sheet of paper between most of them.

We really aren’t sure how the stones were lifted into place. There were no machines, and the Egyptians didn’t have pulleys. The most likely theory is that they built ramps up the side of the pyramid, and dragged the stones on sledges up the ramps. As the building got higher they made the ramps higher and longer. If they didn’t make them longer the slope would have been too steep to drag the stones up. Once the entire pyramid was built, the workmen covered it with marble, to give it a smooth and beautiful finish.

The Workmen

Some people think that slaves built the pyramids, but this probably isn’t true. The farmers didn’t have much to do, or to eat when the Nile was flooded. Since that is the time that they could transport the stones most easily, it is most likely the time when the pyramids were built. The best theory that historians have come up with is that King Khufu used the farmers, during the flood, and paid them with food. Since the farmers had to pay food to the King every year, as a form of tax, it really didn’t cost him anything.

The outside of the pyramid has changed over the years. It is no longer covered in marble. The Ancient Egyptians grew lazy over time, and when they built palaces and grand houses in Cairo, instead of sending to Aswan for their marble, they just took it off the pyramids. By then King Khufu had been dead a very long time, so no one thought he would mind much.

Now read about the inside of the pyramid.