Finally by a fluke, almost a joke, she was accepted. Laughed at, scorned and ridiculed, she was undaunted. She arduously petitioned and applied to medical schools. All the Blackwells were ardent abolitionists.Įlizabeth, the older of the two sisters, knew she had the capacity to become successful in any profession she desired, and she was not going to allow her gender to deter her. They grew up in an educated family of open minded thinkers well-versed in the issues of the day. This could have been a lively book, but instead, it fades away.Įlizabeth and Emily Blackwell were not typical of women living in the mid-1800's. Their circle included suffrage leader Lucy Stone (whose daughter Alice Stone Blackwell became a leader of the movement in her turn) and the Beecher family. And what makes this especially sad is that the Blackwells were fascinating, eccentric people.

Nimura starts out pretty well as a storyteller, but eventually it's more a recounting of the facts, the sort of book where you keep waiting for something to happen, and it really doesn't. Nor was she a suffragette, she seems to have felt that they should focus on active work in the community rather than trying to get the vote.īut here's why this is getting such a low review-it's another for my 'good material, poor execution' shelf.

It was the idea of a woman becoming a doctor that appealed to her. Nimura has done her research well, and I learned a lot about Blackwell that the kid biographies leave out-mainly that she really wasn't that drawn to medicine and didn't practice it that much. I first read about Elizabeth Blackwell in one of those reverent old fashioned kids biographies, long ago, so I was fascinated to read Blackwell's real story. As Elizabeth herself predicted, 'a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now.'. From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women's rights-or with each other. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician.Exploring the sisters' allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment.

'Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of 'ordinary' womanhood.

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