Elizabeth was inspired to become a doctor after one of her friends, who was dying of a painful disease, her condition would be for her handle if she had a female doctor. Elizabeth took a job teaching music to money to pay for medical school. She studied a friend’s medical books and studied anatomy with a doctor, but was continually entrance to medical school. Some doctors recommended that she go to Paris or disguise herself as a man in order to study medicine. Others her because they thought women were intellectually inferior. Finally, in 1847, she was into the Geneva Medical College in upstate New York. In 1849, Blackwell graduated first in her class and became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.