I missed getting an Ada Lovelace Day posting up yesterday because of all the rushing around. Here’s a very brief one.

Thanks to guesting on @Bristol52 this week I discovered that the first woman to graduate from medical school in the USA, Elizabeth Blackwell, was born in Bristol. Her Wikipedia bio is quite spectacular. As well as being a pioneer of women’s rights, she campaigned against slavery and against vivisection. She’s not such a great model as a woman scientist: having been brought up a devout Christian she was convinced that illness was a result of moral depravity, not bacteria, but I suspect that sort of view was common back then.