This Day in History in GoWYLD: Elizabeth Blackwell’s Medical Degree

Jan 23, 2022

"Who Says Women Can't be Doctors" book cover (children's book)On January 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in America to earn a medical degree — graduating first in her class! Two resources in GoWYLD.net, TeachingBooks and Book Connections, offer resources for children’s and young adult books on topics such as Blackwell’s accomplishments.

Teaching Books and Book Connections provide thousands of multimedia resources for children’s and young adult books that can be integrated into reading, library activities, and K-12 curriculum. These are perfect for lesson planning, exploring authors, and professional development.

Library programming

One of the tools is a Literary Calendar. Here you will find links to authors and their books. To get to the calendar in Teaching Books, click on For Educators, top right and in Book Connections, click on For Professionals. Then select Library Programming.

Under Library Programming you’ll find a variety of resources to help promote books: book clubs, book talks, story time, STEAM, and of course the literary calendar!

Blackwell’s story

On January 23, the calendar lists the Anniversary of Elizabeth Blackwell’s Medical Degree and the book, Who Says Women can’t be Doctors?: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell. By going to the record for the book, you’ll find a description of her inspiring story of a strong-willed woman who opened the doors for all the female doctors to come.

There’s a meet-the-author recording, book guides, lessons and activities, and video book reading clips. To help with reader’s advisory, it includes text complexity measures. You can also get the code to embed the literary calendar on your library pages.

Find the resources

TeachingBooks and Book Connections provide a book promotion toolkit, diverse books toolkit, and sharing tools. Check out this robust resource and share it with your patrons, students, and staff. Find both in GoWYLD.net under the Recommended Reading subject area or use Browse Databases by Title. Wyoming users will automatically be signed in by GeoIP authentication.

For more information, about the databases, training, or marketing materials, contact Chris Van Burgh, Wyoming State Library Database Instruction Librarian, chris.vanburgh@wyo.gov.

If you have a question about this or any other article, please contact us at statelibrary@wyo.gov

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