Nellie Bly (May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922)

Nellie Bly was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She was a ground-breaking reporter known for a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism. In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.

She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in "Cochran Mills", today part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Michael Cochran, was a modest laborer and mill worker who married Mary Jane. Cochran taught his young children a cogent lesson about the virtues of hard work and determination, buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse. As a young girl Elizabeth was often called "Pinky" because she so frequently wore the color. As she became a teenager she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated, and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to Cochrane. She attended boarding school for one term, but was forced to drop out due to lack of funds.

In 1880, Cochrane and her family moved to Pittsburgh. An aggressively misogynistic column titled "What Girls Are Good For" in the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to write a fiery rebuttal to the editor under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". The editor George Madden was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself. When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". After her first article for the Dispatch, titled "The Girl Puzzle", Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for Cochrane the editor chose "Nellie Bly", adopted from the title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster. She originally intended for her pseudonym to be "Nelly Bly," but her editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake, and the error stuck.

As a writer, Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. But editorial pressure pushed her to the so-called "women's pages" to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country. Safely home, she denounced Díaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.

Asylum exposé

Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

After a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she checked into a working-class boardinghouse. She refused to go to bed, telling the boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked crazy. They soon decided that she was crazy, and the next morning summoned the police. Taken to a courtroom, she pretended to have amnesia. The judge concluded she had been drugged.

She was then examined by several doctors, who all declared her to be insane. "Positively demented," said one, "I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where someone will take care of her." The head of the insane pavilion at Bellevue Hospital pronounced her "undoubtedly insane". The case of the "pretty crazy girl" attracted media attention: "Who Is This Insane Girl?" asked the New York Sun. The New York Times wrote of the "mysterious waif" with the "wild, hunted look in her eyes", and her desperate cry: "I can't remember I can't remember."

Committed to the asylum, Bly experienced its conditions firsthand. The food consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous patients were tied together with ropes. The patients were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. Waste was all around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not. Speaking with her fellow patients, Bly was convinced that some were as sane as she was. On the effect of her experiences, she wrote:

"What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.

…My teeth chattered and my limbs were …numb with cold. Suddenly, I got three buckets of ice-cold water…one in my eyes, nose and mouth."

After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum at The World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury's report recommended the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. They also made sure that future examinations were more thorough so that only the seriously ill actually went to the asylum.

Around the world

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice,[13] she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,899-mile journey.

She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold in total as well as some American currency)[15] in a bag tied around her neck.

The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world. To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of (only) a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip

On her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, though longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and were thus often delayed by several weeks.

Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race. During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and she bought a monkey in Singapore.

As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. However, World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, and she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 p.m.

"Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure" Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe almost unchaperoned. Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. Like Bly, she had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothina) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria). Bly's journey was a world record, though it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days. By 1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick and John Henry Mears had improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in less than 36 days.

Later years

In 1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman, who was 40 years her senior. She retired from journalism, and became the president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. In 1904, her husband died. In the same year, Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. Although there have been claims that Nellie Bly invented the barrel, the inventor is believed to have been Henry Wehrhahn, who likely assigned his invention to her. (US Patents 808,327 and 808,413). Nellie Bly was, however, an inventor in her own right, receiving US patent 697,553 for a novel milk can and US patent 703,711 for a stacking garbage can, both under her married name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. For a time she was one of the leading female industrialists in the United States, but embezzlement by employees led her into bankruptcy. Back in reporting, she wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I and notably covered the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913. Her headline for the Parade story was “Suffragists Are Men's Superiors” but she also "with uncanny prescience" predicted in the story that it would be 1920 before women would win the vote.

In 1916 Nellie was given a baby boy whose mother requested Bly to look after him and see that he become adopted. The child was illegitimate and difficult to place since he was half-Japanese. He spent the next six years in an orphanage run by the Church For All Nations in Manhattan.

As Bly became ill towards the end of her life she requested that her niece, Beatrice Brown, look after the boy and several other babies in whom she had become interested. Her interest in orphanages may have been part of her ongoing efforts to improve the social organizations of the day.

She died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City in 1922, at age 57. She was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Kate Warne (1833 – January 28, 1868)

Kate Warne was the first female detective in the United States.

Described by Allan Pinkerton as a slender, brown haired woman, there is not much else known about Warne prior to when she walked into the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1856. Born in New York, Warne became a widow shortly after she married. Warne was left as a young childless widow in search of work. In answer to an ad in a local newspaper, Warne walked into Pinkerton's Chicago office in search of a job. There is still debate whether or not she walked in with intentions to become a detective or just a secretary. Women were not detectives until well after the Civil War. Pinkerton himself claimed that Warne came into his agency and demanded to become a detective. According to Pinkerton's records, he

"was surprised to learn Kate was not looking for clerical work, but was actually answering an advertisement for detectives he had placed in a Chicago newspaper. At the time, such a concept was almost unheard of. Pinkerton said " It is not the custom to employ women detectives!" Kate argued her point of view eloquently - pointing out that women could be "most useful in worming out secrets in many places which would be impossible for a male detective." A Woman would be able to befriend the wives and girlfriends of suspected criminals and gain their confidence. Men become braggarts when they are around women who encourage them to boast. Kate also noted, Women have an eye for detail and are excellent observers."

Warne's arguments swayed Pinkerton, who at 10 o'clock on the morning of August 23, 1856, employed Warne as the first female detective. Pinkerton soon had a chance to put Warne to the test. In 1858, Warne was involved in the case of Adams Express Company embezzlements where she was successfully able to bring herself into the confidence of the wife of the prime suspect, Mr. Maroney. She thereby acquired the valuable evidence leading to the husband's conviction. Mr. Maroney was an expressman living in Montgomery, Alabama. The Maroneys stole $50,000 from the Adams Express Company. With Warne’s help, $39,515 was returned. Mr. Maroney was convicted and sentenced to ten years in Montgomery, Alabama.

This was just the beginning of Warne's career, she later went on to solve many more cases until she died shortly after the Civil War. She suddenly caught pneumonia on New Year's Day, 1868, and died on January 28 with Pinkerton at her bedside. She is buried in the Pinkerton Family Plot in Chicago Illinois' Graceland Cemetery. The grave is marked in the Graceland Cemetery under the name of "Kate Warn"; it states that she died of congestion of the lungs at the age of 38. She was buried January 30, 1868.

Alessandra Giliani (1307-1326)

Alessandra Giliani was the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy (which today would be called pathology)

Giliani is believed to have been born in 1307, in San Giovanni in Persiceto, in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. The chronicle of her life holds that she died in 1326, possibly from a septic wound, at the age of 19. Celebrated as the first female anatomist of the Western World, she is reputed to have been a brilliant prosector (preparer of corpses for anatomical dissection). She worked as the surgical assistant to Mondino de' Liuzzi (d. 1326), a world-renowned professor at the medical school of the University of Bologna. (Credited with being the father of modern anatomy, de' Liuzzi published a seminal text on the subject in 1316.)

Giliani is said to have carried out her own anatomical investigations, developing a method of draining the blood from a corpse and replacing it with a hardening coloured dye—and possibly adding to our understanding of the coronary-pulmonary circulatory system. (All evidence of her work was either lost or destroyed.)

Alessandra Giliani's short life was honoured by Otto Angenius, also one of Mondino's assistants and probably her fiance, with a plaque at the Church of San Pietro e Marcellino[disambiguation needed] in Rome which describes her work.


She is mentioned by the nineteenth-century historian Michele Medici, who published a history of the Bolognese school of anatomy in 1857.

Barbara Quick's novel, A Golden Web, published by HarperTeen in 2010, is a fictional re-imagining of Alessandra Giliani's life and times.

Mary Anning (May 21, 1799 – March 9, 1847)

Mary Anning was a British fossil collector, dealer, and paleontologist who became known around the world for important finds she made in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis in Dorset, a county in Southwest England on the coast of the English Channel, where she lived. Her work contributed to fundamental changes that occurred during her lifetime in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.

Mary Anning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. It was dangerous work, and she nearly lost her life in 1833 during a landslide that killed her dog, Tray. Her discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton correctly identified, which she and her brother Joseph found when she was just twelve years old; the first two plesiosaur skeletons found; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and important fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces. She also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods. When geologist Henry De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, he based it largely on fossils Anning had found, and sold prints of it for her benefit.

Due to Anning's gender and social class, she was prevented from fully participating in the scientific community of 19th-century Britain, dominated as it was by wealthy Anglican gentlemen. She struggled financially for much of her life. Her family was poor, and as religious dissenters, were subject to legal discrimination. Her father, a cabinetmaker, died when she was eleven.

She became well known in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, and was consulted on issues of anatomy as well as about collecting fossils. Nonetheless, as a woman, she was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London and she did not always receive full credit for her scientific contributions. Indeed, she wrote in a letter: "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone." The only scientific writing of hers published in her lifetime appeared in the Magazine of Natural History in 1839, an extract from a letter that Anning had written to the magazine's editor questioning one of its claims.

After her death in 1847, her unusual life story attracted increasing interest. Charles Dickens wrote of her in 1865 that "[t]he carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and has deserved to win it." In 2010, one hundred and sixty-three years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science.

Jacobina Félicie

(There is no known picture of her.)

Jacqueline Felice de Almania, (in Italian: Jacobina Félicie), (fl. 1322) was an Italian physician active in Paris, France.

Jacobina Félicie was reportedly from Florence in Italy, and was active as a physician in Paris in 1322. She belonged to the minority of licensed female physicians of her time period; in 1292, there were eight female physicians registered in Paris. In 1322, however, Jacobina Félicie was put on trial for unlawful practice. During the trial many testimonies were given where she was said to have cured patients where other physicians had failed and given up hope of the patient's recovery, and according to one witness, she was reputed to be a better physician and surgeon than any of the French physicians in Paris. Despite the testimonies that she was able to cure people the male physicians had given up on, the court reasoned that it was obvious that a man could understand the subject of medicine better than a woman because of his gender. She was banned from practicing medicine and threatened with excommunication if she ever did so again. This decision is considered to have banned women from academic study in medicine in France and obtaining licenses until the 19th-century.

Agnodice (c. 4th century BCE)

Agnodice was born into a wealthy family in Athens, Greece. Her desire to become a physician initiated from witnessing increased numbers of women dying or undergoing painful childbirths. Though women were allowed to learn gynecology, obstetrics, healing, and midwifery in the time of Hippocrates, after his death the leaders of Athens discovered that women were performing abortions, and made becoming a female doctor a capital crime. Agnodice, determined to become a physician and help the women of Athens, cut her hair and donned the clothes of a man to pursue medical training. Agnodice then used an alleged friend’s sickness to account for her future leave to pursue medical training. She then left Athens to study medicine in nearby Egypt, where women played an important role in the medical community.

Agnodice received her medical education in Alexandria, Egypt at the University of Alexandria, and studied under Herophilos, the great anatomist of his day. Soon after acquiring the requisite qualifications, she continued to dress as a man in order to treat the women of Athens. One day, Agnodice heard a woman crying out as she was undergoing labor. Agnodice then went to care for the women in labor, but the woman refused male aid. After revealing herself as a woman, the woman allowed Agnodice to treat her successfully. During the time, women dreaded calling in professional assistance. Agnodice symbolized the trust and comfort between women aiding women. Before long, many women heard about Agnodice being disguised as a male and sought for her care. Agnodice popularity grew the women from the city of Athens began to seek her aid rather than male physicians.

When male physicians began to see that their services were no longer desired by women, the male physicians began to accuse Agnodice for seducing the women and the women were accused of feigning illnesses. Agnodice was then tried before a group of jealous husbands and rivaled doctors for seducing the women of Athens. When Agnodice was brought before the court assembled on a hill near Athens called Areopagus, the men began to condemn her. She then lifted her tunic to revealed her true identity and was condemned further by the men of Athens for her deceit and false pretenses. With a crime warranted of execution if carried out, Agnodice then convinced the judges that it was impossible she could be guilty of the alleged crimes the men claimed upon her. Her adversaries then sought to condemn her for violating the law in which women were not allowed to study any branch of medicine. Before the judges ruled on the trial, a crowd of women arrived at her trial to praise her successes as a physician and chastised their husbands for trying to execute Agnodice. After a short debate, Agnodice was acquitted from her charges and the Athenian law was changed to allow women to be treated by female physicians in Athens.


Before Agnodice, women were taking care of the sick, as well as trying to figure out how the body worked and causes of diseases. Women were also midwives, helping deliver babies, but were not allowed to practice medicine. For the Greeks, Agnodice trial brought changes with the Athenians law which thereby allowed women to study medicine. Agnodice story has also been used through the seventeenth century as a tale for midwives to defend themselves against male-dominated professions seeking to incorporate the study of medicine into childbirth.

Sybil Ludington (April 5, 1761 – February 26, 1839)

In celebration of Independence Day, we remember a little known hero of the American Revolutionary War, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington. At approximately 9 pm on April 26th, 1777, Sybil, the eldest daughter of Colonel Henry Ludington, climbed onto her horse and proceeded to ride 40 miles in order to muster local militia troops in response to a British attack on the town of Danbury, Connecticut -- covering twice the distance that Paul Revere rode during his famous midnight ride.

Riding all night through rain, Sybil returned home at dawn having given nearly the whole regiment of 400 Colonial troops the order to assemble. While the regiment could not save Danbury from being burned, they joined forces with the Continental Army following the subsequent Battle of Ridgefield and were able to stop the British advance and force their return to their boats.

Following the battle, General George Washington personally thanked Sybil for her service and bravery. Although every American school child knows the story of Paul Revere, unfortunately few are taught about Sybil Ludington's courageous feat and her contribution to war effort.

Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852)

Lovelace's interest in mathematics dominated her life for that reason mother taught Lovelace mathematics at an early age. Lovelace was privately home schooled in mathematics and science. Lovelace was arguably the world’s first computer programmer; the programming language “Ada” was named in her honor.

In 1834 she became interested in the plans for Charles Babbage’s proposed calculating machines. Her 1843 article on Babbage’s “analytical engine” included detailed instructions on how such a machine might be programmed, as well as how to calculate Bernoulli numbers.

Over one hundred years after her death Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished after being forgotten as is now recognized as an early model for a computer and as a description of a computer and software.

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997)

Dr. Wu came to the U.S. in 1936 after graduating with a B.S. from Nanking Central University. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1940.

She worked with the Manhattan Project research team to develop the atomic bomb. Her most notable accomplishment was to disprove the “law of conservation of parity.” Two of her colleagues, Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee and Dr. Chen Ning Yang were instead awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1957 – a fact widely blamed on sexism by the Nobel election committee.

Her many accomplishments won the nicknames of “First Lady of Physics,” and “Madam Curie of China.” She also became the first living scientist to have an asteroid named after her.

Judith Resnik (1949-1986)

With a bachelor’s degree, Resnik went to work with RCA. She was assigned first to the missile and service radar division and then to the service division. In 1974, she joined the National Institutes of Health as a staff scientist in the neurophysiology department which led her to earning her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland.

Her interest in solving problems and discovering new frontiers lead her to NASA in 1978. She was one of the first six women to ever enter the U.S. space program and on August 30, 1984 she became the second American women ever to fly in space, on the six day Discovery mission.

On Earth she worked with others on designing and developing the remote manipulator system. But before she could test her equipment in orbit, she died tragically in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921-Present)

Her interest in physics was piqued when she heard the noted physicist, Enrico Fermi, speak about the new field of nuclear physics. After graduating with honors from Hunter College, she overcame formidable discrimination against women but entered the University of Illinois’s College of Engineering Physics Department. She was the only woman among 400 men.

She received her Ph.D. in nuclear physics and after a few research jobs, she went to Bronx Veterans’ Hospital laboratory to follow her dream. She helped discovered how to use radioisotopes to measure levels of tiny amounts of hormones in the human blood system. This method, called RIA, is crucial to determining conditions like hypothyroidism in infants, which can be treated upon diagnosis. After being passed over twice, Dr. Yalow received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1977, the second women ever to be so honored.

Jane Goodall (1939- PRESENT)

Animals may not be people, too, but they're more like us than we might like to believe, particularly when it comes to primates.

Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees opened our eyes to chimpanzee life, and in the process, to our own evolutionary roots.

In documenting chimps' complex social webs, as well as their use of tools and wide range of emotions, Goodall's work blurred the line between human and animal and made it clear that treating primates well was an ethical issue.

In the years since she first became known, Goodall has also become a passionate advocate on the part of primates like chimpanzees, serving as a very public voice for the animals who can't find their own.

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910)

Look, getting into medical school is tough; everyone knows that.

But for Elizabeth Blackwell, her rejection letter had nothing to do with MCAT scores or letters of recommendation. Back in 1849, it was a pretty big deal for a woman to even try to practice medicine, and medical schools weren't exactly eager to help a girl out.

Even once Blackwell graduated, she had a hard time getting a hospital to hire her. She eventually set up her own practice back home in New York, but continued to face professional hostility.

And that's when she became part of the solution, training women in medicine and nursing and providing them with a place to practice. Sometimes, you really do have to do everything yourself.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)

Who do you think of when you think of DNA? Watson? Crick? How about Franklin?

Rosalind Franklin was, for too long, the overshadowed party in Watson and Crick's story of how they unraveled the structure of DNA. Franklin took the X-ray diffraction images of DNA that indicated its twisted, double-helical structure; without her precise lab work, attention to detail and thoughtful analysis, those X-ray images wouldn't have been worth a penny.

What's more, without those images Watson and Crick would not have been able to publish their notable 1953 paper on the structure of DNA. Those images, leaked to Watson and Crick by Franklin's lab partner, made the difference in the discovery...but not in the recognition.

In 1962, Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their work on the structure of DNA; by then, Franklin had been dead for four years, a victim of ovarian cancer.