In Paperback 1.18.22
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
“Deftly, with a keen eye, Janice P. Nimura has resurrected Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell in all their feisty, thrilling, trailblazing splendor.”―Stacy Schiff
The world recoiled at the notion of a woman doctor, yet Elizabeth Blackwell persisted―in 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an MD. Her achievement made her an icon―“I am convinced that a new & nobler era is dawning, for Medicine,” she wrote―but her sister Emily, eternally eclipsed, was the more brilliant physician. Together they founded the first hospital staffed entirely by women, in New York City.
Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights―or with each other. “Doubt is disease,” Elizabeth insisted. They prevailed against fierce resistance from the male establishment, moving among Britain, France, and America during a tumultuous time of scientific discovery and civil war. This major new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility. As Elizabeth predicted, “a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now.”
Reviews
“Enthralling…Nimura, by digging into [the Blackwells’] 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.”
–Jennifer Szalai, New York Times (read full review)
“[A] richly detailed and propulsive biography….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.”
–Joanna Scutts, New York Times Book Review (read full review)
“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….[Her] chronicle of the loneliness of the Blackwells’ path, made harder by their habitual unwillingness to compromise or accommodate, is enormously affecting….Ms. Nimura’s portrait of the Blackwells’ America blazes with hallucinatory energy.”
–Wall Street Journal (link to review)
“The Doctors Blackwell is best on the fascinating and harrowing history of modern medicine….[Nimura] is a close and delightful observer of [the Blackwells’] world.”
–The New Yorker (link to review)
“In The Doctors Blackwell, Janice P. Nimura invites us to learn about medicine, well-to-do women and social movements of the 19th century. 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.”
–Washington Post (link to review)
“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, medical training in Europe, family life and friendships with Florence Nightingale, Lucy Stone, Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Lady Byron and many other contemporaries.”
–Seattle Times (read full review)
“The meticulously researched narrative — informed by newspaper reports, journal entries, and a staggering volume of letters — 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….Nimura tells the kind of nuanced tale that people like to hear.”
–Boston Globe (read full review)
“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.”
–NPR (read full review)
“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 of the sisters’ lives.”
–USA Today (link to review)
“Nimura’s vivid, assiduously researched account reads like a novel.”
–Oprah Magazine (read mention)
“Could not be more timely.”
–Entertainment Weekly (read mention)
“A detailed story of hard work, determination and evolving goals.”
–Minneapolis Star Tribune (read full review)
“Nimura writes fluidly, and her book is an engaging and meticulously documented guide not only to the sisters’ lives but also to the medical practices of their time….But the greater part of Nimura’s achievement lies in how she brings new life to the story of two extraordinary and idiosyncratic physicians who forever changed the medical profession.”
–The American Scholar (link to review)
“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.”
–Science (read full review)
“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…. 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.”
–Nature (read full review)
“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.”
–Discover (read full review)
“Nimura uses an extensive collection of journal entries and letters to trace Blackwell’s trailblazing journey through medical school and her further training in the U.S. and abroad.”
–Scientific American (read full review)
“Nimura’s beautifully crafted, meticulously researched book and vivid storytelling style gets to the heart of two pioneers in the history of medicine whose lives are an inspiration to our own and next generations of physicians of any gender.”
—Journal of the American Medical Association (read full review)
“As Janice P. Nimura makes clear in The Doctors Blackwell, her impeccably researched and beautifully articulated retelling, Blackwell was neither iconic feminist nor iconic physician, but both less and perhaps more of each than generally advertised.”
–Undark (read full review)
“Elizabeth and Emily still have a place among our feisty pioneers, but 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.”
–National Book Review (read full review)
“By skillfully blending intimate details of the Blackwell sisters’ eccentricities with a stirring account of the nineteenth-century medical landscape, Nimura’s highly engaging book will undoubtedly be of great interest to a broad readership….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.”
–Women’s Review of Books (link to review)
“Writing with poetic flair, Nimura frames the book around the arduous journeys of both Elizabeth Blackwell, who in 1849 became the first woman in the US to earn an MD, and her younger sister, Emily, who received her MD five years later. Emily—portrayed here as the more skilled but less celebrated sister—is often a minor player in the Blackwell story simply because she wasn’t first. That alone makes this book a richer read than others.”
–Yale Alumni Magazine (read full review)
“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.”
–Columbia Magazine (read full review)
“Nimura brings [the Blackwells’] aspirations to life in a zestful chronicle that should be read and shared in discussion by modern women, lest we forget.”
–Bookreporter (read full review)
“Janice P. Nimura’s compelling biography…reclaims the sisters’ enduring contributions to medicine and to women’s history. In breathtaking prose…[The Doctors Blackwell] 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.”
–Bookpage (read full review)
“A captivating biography. . . . 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.”
–Publishers Weekly, starred review (read full review)
“A riveting dual biography of America’s first female physicians…deftly weaving together a dramatic true story that reads like a work of historical fiction….Peppered with appearances from Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, and others, the text is a vibrant landscape that affirms the prominent place of the Blackwell sisters in medical history.”
–Kirkus Reviews, starred review (read full review)
“Nimura brings to life the fascinating histories of physicians Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, and their extended family.”
–Library Journal, starred review (read full review)
“Nimura brings [the Blackwells’] world vividly to life in this portrait of the sisters and their professional partnership… With the fiercely intelligent, prickly sisters at the center, Nimura’s engrossing and enlightening group biography is highly recommended.”
–Booklist, starred review (read full review)
“Janice Nimura’s The Doctors Blackwell should be required reading in all medical schools, indeed for anyone who has ever consulted a doctor. This rousing story of two brilliant and determined 19th century sisters is also a history of American medicine—how it was practiced and by whom. That the Blackwells arrived in the United States during a cholera epidemic and made it their mission to provide medical care to the underserved, while also promoting the twin causes of women’s rights and abolition, brings this narrative hurtling into the 21st century, demanding our attention today.”
–Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
“The Blackwell sisters took on the medical establishment and won. They are heroines, not just of their time, but for every age. Their incredible story has been crying out to be told, and in Janice Nimura they have the ideal biographer. The Blackwells live and triumph again.”
–Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire
“Janice Nimura has gifted us with more than a splendid history of the Blackwell sisters. Gripping, vividly written, and moving, it is also a surprisingly timely history of the misogynist, limited, still evolving Anglo-American medical profession.”
–Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols 1-3
“All doctors and all patients owe a debt to these eccentric determined brilliant characters, Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who found their way across the strange and bloody landscape of nineteenth-century medicine, and transformed it forever, all brilliantly conjured in Janice Nimura’s wonderful book.”
–Perri Klass, author of A Good Time to Be Born