from the colleagues, they were unable to outvote her opponents. She was rejected from the professional medical society based on her gender. Hoping to open medical schools to women, Zakrzewska, along with Emily Blackwell, Lucy Sewell, Helen Morton, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and many other women, sent a letter to Harvard University. They offered $50,000 to establish a medical program for women. The university denied this offer. Their hopes were not shaken. This offer was accepted by Johns Hopkins University and opened its doors to women the successive year. After many hard-fought years practicing medicine and establishing accessible medical education for women, Zakrzewska retired in 1890. She spent the rest of her life consulting on projects and arranging affairs. In 1899, the main building of the hospital would be renamed the "Zakrzewska Building." Marie Zakrzewska died a few years later on May 12, 1902 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts due to what was thought to be a heart attack. During her service, her fellow colleagues and friends gathered to pay their respects, reading farewell letters that Zakrzewska had written for the occasion. Her home is a site on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail and Zakrzewska lived a successful life, breaking barriers that hindered women in practicing medicine in the United States, founded hospitals for women, and pioneered the movement that opened the nursing profession to black women with the first black nurse in America graduating from the school in 1879. As a feminist and abolitionist, she became friends with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Karl Heinzen. Role in early playground movement Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska introduced to America the German idea to build sand gardens for children, starting in the city of Boston, inspired by the German sand gardens she observed while visiting Berlin in the summer of 1885. Notes Further reading Frances E. Willard; Mary A. Livermore (eds) Maria Elizabeth Zakrzewska, Woman of the Century 1893 Graves, Mary H. "Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska", Representative Women of New England. 1904 "Zakrzewska, Marie." In Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers, by Helen Rappaport. ABC-CLIO, 2001. External links Jamaica Plain Historical Society Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America's Women Physicians - Dr. Marie E. Zakrzewska - A Project of the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. 1829 births 1902 deaths 19th-century American physicians 19th-century American women physicians Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine alumni German emigrants to the