Physician. Known as "Dr. Zak", she was born in Berlin to a midwife mother. Following in her mother's footsteps, she studied midwifery at the Royal Charite Hospital in Berlin and after her training was made head midwife in 1852. After complaints by other staff regarding her appointment she decided to come the United States in 1853, where she eventually met Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who encouraged her to learn English and enroll at the Cleveland (Western Reserve) Medical College, which she did, graduating in 1856 as one of only four women in a class of about two hundred. The following year Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister, Dr. Emily Blackwell opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, where Dr. Zakrzewska was a physician for two years. In 1859 she was made Professor of Obstetrics at the New England Female Medical College in Boston. She was dissatisfied that the school's founder, Dr. Samuel Gregory, wanted to train doctors to be little more than midwives and was not interested in teaching a more scientific approach to medicine. She resigned in 1862 to found the New England Hospital for Women and Children, the second hospital in America run exclusively by women physicians and surgeons. Its purpose was to train women for the medical profession by giving them extensive hands-on clinical experience with their female patients, something that was lacking for females in the medical field at that time. A nursing school was opened a decade later, and amongst its early graduates were the first professionally trained nurse, Linda Richards, and the first African-American trained nurse, Mary Eliza Mahoney. Dr. Zakrzewska remained active as a physician, both at the hospital and in private practice until her retirement in 1899. The hospital still exists in Roxbury, and was renamed in 1969 as the Dimock Community Health Center, in honor of Dr. Zakrzewska's colleague Dr. Susan Dimock. Outside of medicine, she was actively involved in the abolishionist and women's suffrage movements, and counted amongst her close friends William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Lucy Stone. She was among the first members of the New England Women's Club and was also a member of the American Woman Suffrage Association.