Janice P. Nimura, in her enthralling new book, The Doctors Blackwell, tells the story of two sisters who became feminist figures almost in spite of themselves ... The broad outlines of their lives could have made for a salutary tale about the formidable achievements of pioneering women; instead, Nimura — a gifted storyteller [...] recounted another narrative of women’s education and emancipation — offers something stranger and more absorbing ... A culture that valorizes heroes insists on consistency, and the Blackwell sisters liked to see themselves as unwavering stewards of lofty ideals. But Nimura, by digging into their deeds and their lives, finds those discrepancies and idiosyncrasies that yield a memorable portrait. The Doctors Blackwell also opens up a sense of possibility — you don’t always have to mean well on all fronts in order to do a lot of good.
Ms. Nimura places the stubborn, brilliant Blackwell sisters in an America that seems both utterly foreign and jarringly familiar, and she does so at a moment when we’re forced to confront the limitations of the medical orthodoxies and public-health initiatives of our time ... Ms. Nimura’s chronicle of the loneliness of the Blackwells’ path, made harder by their habitual unwillingness to compromise or accommodate, is enormously affecting. As in this author’s previous book, she is wonderfully attentive to nuances and contradictions, noting Elizabeth’s internalized misogyny as she deplored the silliness of women and aligned herself with men ... Small, memorable details pop up throughout the book...Yet it’s the largeness of this story that most impresses. It ranges through European capitals and many American cities during a time when travel was arduous and slow. Along the way, encounters with a surprising number of notable figures emerge ... Ms. Nimura’s portrait of the Blackwells’ America blazes with hallucinatory energy. It’s a rough-hewn, gaudy, carnival-barking America, with only the thinnest veneer of gentility overlaying cruelty and a simmering violence ... fits as a vivid echo of our own America, suspended as we are in another feverish moment of both crisis and opportunity.
Janice Nimura’s candid account engagingly captures Elizabeth’s many contradictions ... The meticulously researched narrative [...] offers an intimate look at the close-knit, high-minded Blackwell family, including Elizabeth’s younger sister Emily, who followed in Elizabeth’s medical footsteps ... By depicting this complicated character fully, faults and all, Nimura tells the kind of nuanced tale that people like to hear.
... richly detailed and propulsive ... Elizabeth is a striking figure, and Emily, self-doubting and hardworking, never quite gets clear of her shadow. To her credit, Nimura...doesn’t strain to fit the sisters into the narrow shape allowed to feminist pioneers, as either virtuous role models or 'badass' rebels against society. Instead, they emerge as spiky, complicated human beings, who strove and stumbled toward an extraordinary achievement, and then had to learn what to do with it.
... compelling ... reclaims the sisters’ enduring contributions to medicine and to women’s history ... breathtaking prose and exhaustive detail ... Nimura’s compelling biography not only recovers the lives and work of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell but also provides a colorful social history of medicine in America and Europe during the mid- to late-19th century.
... compelling ... Nimura gives their history the complexity it deserves, setting their lives and ambitions in the unsettled world of the early nineteenth-century United States ... Nimura’s gift is to use the Blackwell family’s writings to set us down in the thick of things and then move us through the world as the Blackwells saw it, with all the struggle and uncertainty that shaped their lives. Nimura is a remarkable biographer and sits gracefully in the background and lets characters speak and act ... beautifully written ... Beyond the Blackwell family, Nimura has recruited a generous cast and captured the reformist tumult of the American 1840s ... [a] wonderful book.
Author Nimura has combed through mountains of documents to bring all of the siblings alive through their own words. The book is illustrated with photographs that bring the era to life ... The Doctors Blackwell not only testifies to Elizabeth and Emily's iron determination but also chronicles evolving medical practices. Nimura places the sisters within the broad intellectual context of their time, creating an important and engaging history lesson.
If The Doctors Blackwell is not exactly a lively book, we may put this down to the 'chilly company,' as Nimura puts it, of its subjects ... If we cannot find the sisters endearing, we must honor them for their contribution to the health and, despite their dim view of the female character, to the rights of women.
3/4 stars ... [A] fascinating dual biography that restores the two sisters to their rightful place in U.S. history and illuminates a period riven like our own with bitter disagreements over race, public health and medicine, and the role of women in society ... Nimura shoehorns a lot of history into this carefully researched, briskly paced narrative.
Nimura, an independent historian, knows how to tell this kind of story ... Nimura draws from the many letters the Blackwells wrote, contemporaneous news articles about them, and the histories of the institutions that interacted with them — either educating them or refusing to do so — to bring their story to life ... Nimura seamlessly weaves these strands of medical and American history by focusing on the lives of these two self-made women. With an eye to the telling detail, she animates their ambitions ... their story is one worth knowing.
Nimura’s biography of Elizabeth and Emily, along with their five siblings, is thorough and for the most part compelling. It is wide-ranging and involves the obsessively close family and the feminists two of the brother married, the social beliefs and norms of the time, and reveals the horrors of 19th century medicine, particularly heinous for women.
In addition to its elegant readability, The Doctors Blackwell also makes a vital and long-awaited contribution to the scholarship of the history of medicine by reframing the mainstream narrative to include the heretofore largely overlooked clinical and professional accomplishments of the Blackwell sisters ... Based on a thorough assessment of journal entries, personal correspondence, and Elizabeth Blackwell’s medical publications, this in-depth analysis puts the accomplishments of the Blackwell sisters within an appropriate historical context and removes the taint of anachronism that has sensationalized Elizabeth Blackwell as a radical and willing participant in the women’s rights movement ... The biographical narrative of the Blackwell siblings woven throughout is captivating, and it illuminates some of the factors that led the sisters to pursue an unconventional career path ... Although The Doctors Blackwell brings to life a dynamic cast of characters in the history of modern medicine, it misses an important opportunity to develop a more robust discussion of the intersections between race and gender ... century medical landscape. Nonetheless, this absorbing biography effectively traces the course of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell’s uphill battles to achieve legitimacy as medical professionals. Although the Blackwell sisters may not have intended to challenge the system or inspire a legacy of activism, they inadvertently opened doors for generations of female practitioners and patients. By presenting a nuanced and multifaceted account rather than a one-dimensional mythologized narrative of feminist iconography, Nimura has done a great service to the Blackwells and to modern audiences alike.
Janice P. Nimura shines new light on the life and accomplishments of Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician, and equally on the achievements of her dynamic younger sister and fellow doctor, Emily ... Nimura previously demonstrated her facility with historical research and her ability to bring the past to life in Daughters of the Samurai. In writing about the Blackwells, two dynamic but very different women, she has delved into their era’s medical practices ... Nimura brings their aspirations to life in a zestful chronicle that should be read and shared in discussion by modern women, lest we forget.
In this honest narrative, the path for women in medicine was not created by an army of kind, like-minded people, but by determined individuals, each with her own agenda. These might not be heroines we can wholeheartedly admire, but they dared to kick down the door of the all-male US medical establishment ... Nimura has remarkably detailed insight into the thoughts and views of the sisters through a trove of letters between them (and their siblings), as well as diaries that reveal a complicated picture.
One part of the Blackwell story that’s well established is that Elizabeth was rejected from twenty-nine medical schools before she was accepted ... trading hagiography for historical fact is always a worthwhile enterprise, and Nimura’s impressively researched book, which makes liberal use of the subjects’ letters and journals, renders these nineteenth-century groundbreakers as complex, contradictory human beings ... Nimura fleshes out this oft-cited description of Blackwell’s struggle to get into med school with a story about how the acceptance nearly didn’t happen ... When it comes to Elizabeth’s legacy as a Victorian feminist, Nimura doesn’t gloss over her subject’s contradictory views.
After delving into the sisters’ letters and papers, the author ably illuminates the Blackwells’ struggles, the opposition they faced and the allies who helped make their success possible ... Nimura often sidesteps details of the Blackwells’ private lives and at times presents too much information, particularly about their clothing and residences. Despite the periodic narrative detours, the book moves at a lively pace ... In 1994, almost 150 years after Elizabeth began her studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the successor to Geneva Medical College, erected a statue of her. Despite decades of medical practice and institutional leadership, Emily has yet to receive that honor. Reading this smart double biography makes clear why that delay in the first instance, and omission in the second, is regrettable.
The Blackwell sisters, who in 1857 opened the first women-run hospital in New York City, set forth a precedent for health care that would transform a traditionally male-focused practice. Nimura shocks and enthralls with her blunt, vivid storytelling. She draws on the writings of Elizabeth and Emily in an intimate way that makes it feel like she knew the sisters personally. Alongside glaring descriptions of culturally ingrained sexism and discrimination, the biography also touches on how our standards of medicine have changed over the decades, showing how even the most scientific of professions are subject to major culture shifts.
... is best on the fascinating and harrowing history of modern medicine ... [Nimura's] book hews closely to the structure of Elizabeth Blackwell’s autobiography—a questionable decision, since it means that, like Blackwell, she is slow to get into the actual practice of medicine and quick to leave it. The last forty years of the sisters’ lives are confined to Nimura’s final chapter, which is called 'Divergence,' because it describes the period when their collaboration ended ... Nimura is not an apologist for the Blackwells. While she dutifully reports the facts of their lives, she never fully confronts their deepest contradictions: as women who sought their own advancement while opposing women’s rights, as doctors for whom the etiology of disease lay in moral degeneracy. The Blackwells may not have felt the need to explain their inconsistencies, but it is one of the tasks of a biographer to make her subjects intelligible. Instead, Nimura, who seems to regard complexity as its own virtue, remains circumspect about the discordances of their public lives and their private ones, too ... if Nimura is too frequently deferential toward her subjects, she is a close and delightful observer of their world. One of the strengths of her book is that it brims with hints of richer stories: the whole of the Blackwell clan and their spouses; the cohort of pioneering female doctors to which the Blackwells belonged; above all, the advancement of medicine beyond its days of 'horrid barbarism' and the roles that women have played in that progress.
In breathtaking prose and exhaustive detail, Nimura chronicles the lives of the Blackwell sisters ... Nimura’s compelling biography not only recovers the lives and work of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell but also provides a colorful social history of medicine in America and Europe during the mid- to late-19th century.
In The Doctors Blackwell , Janice Nimura shifts between Blackwell’s own account of her singular greatness and the story of her relationship with her medical colleague, occasional roommate, and little sister, Emily. Nimura’s smart and skillful collective biography layers an account of an exceptional individual onto a narrative of the interdependence and political structures that made the myth of Elizabeth Blackwell possible.
Nimura brings to life the fascinating histories of physicians Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell ... Nimura has done extensive research on her subjects, using archives, letters, contemporary writings, and secondary materials to bring their stories to life ... This book is an excellent read for those interested in the history of medicine and those who enjoy a well-written biography.
Nimura brings their world vividly to life ... Nimura deftly reveals the differences between their experiences and ours through explorations of the theories, practices, and controversies of mid-nineteenth-century medicine; the Blackwells’ ambiguous relationships with the women’s rights and women’s education movements; and the niche that they and other women found as practitioners for the poor, benefiting from the willingness of the wealthy to consign charity care to the women doctors who they themselves would not patronize. With the fiercely intelligent, prickly sisters at the center, Nimura’s engrossing and enlightening group biography is highly recommended.
... riveting ... Nimura chronicles the lives and work of Elizabeth (1821-1910) and Emily (1826-1910) Blackwell, America’s first and third women to earn medical degrees, deftly weaving together a dramatic true story that reads like a work of historical fiction ... Maintaining narrative momentum, Nimura packs the text with evocative, memorable vignettes ... Refreshingly, the author does not portray these women as one-dimensional figures of women’s suffrage, which they resolutely were not. Instead, she describes how both sisters often viewed women without admiration or sisterly affection ... the text is a vibrant landscape that affirms the prominent place of the Blackwell sisters in medical history. Illustrating how they created and activated rich networks of supporters and sympathizers, both men and women, throughout their professional pursuits, Nimura is careful never to embellish one sister’s character at the expense of the other. As she clearly demonstrates, each possessed characteristic strengths and weaknesses ... A compellingly portrayed and vividly realized biography of triumph and trailblazing.
... captivating ... In recounting the lives of two ambitious figures who opened doors for many who came after them, Nimura casts a thoughtful and revelatory new light onto women’s and medical history.
