the doctors blackwell by janice p nimura

When she was 18, however, her father died, leaving the family penniless. “The very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust,” she later wrote. The Blackwell children had few friends and few clothes but plenty of books, intellectual stimulation, and moral instruction.Įlizabeth’s path to medicine was not preordained. Inhabiting those inhospitable Blackwell heights required a fierce work ethic, a rejection of material pleasures, political engagement, and most important, an intense focus on education. Samuel and his wife, Hannah Lane, were active abolitionists but defined themselves more broadly as ideological contrarians, “striving toward a moral high ground,” Nimura writes, “that the placid mainstream ignored, dismissed, or failed to imagine.” Elizabeth spent her entire life in these “isolated and inhospitable heights,” achieving what she thought was right, but often disdainful of others. The family lived in New York City but later relocated to Cincinnati. The Blackwell clan-two parents, nine children, four “starveling aunts”-originated in Bristol, England, and migrated to the United States after the father, Samuel Blackwell, lost his sugar refinery business in a conflagration. Nimura, in her new book, The Doctors Blackwell, aims to give both doctors their proper due. Few people today know much about what she actually did, and fewer are even aware of her younger sister Emily, by far the more accomplished clinician.

But for most of us in medicine, she is only that. Review of: The Doctors Blackwell: How TwoĮlizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in America to earn a medical degree, is an icon.

The doctors blackwell by janice p nimura