How did you respond to the writing? And how did the hybrid structure affect the book’s pacing? The book is an amalgam of the author’s writing and the many letters that flowed back and forth between Elizabeth, Emily, their family and their mentors.As Elizabeth herself predicted, “a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now.”ġ0 Book Club Questions for The Doctors Blackwell 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.Įxploring 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. The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine, Janice P NimuraĮlizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of “ordinary” womanhood. Our club questions for The Doctors Blackwell will help you and your group explore the sisters’ motivations, ambitions, Protestant work ethic, contradictory attitudes about women and more. Use our discussion guide for The Doctors Blackwell to unpack some of those complications. But theirs was a complicated path and they were definitely complicated women.

They persisted in raising awareness of the need to bring female doctors into the field, even running their own medical school. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America to graduate from medical school, and her sister Emily wasn’t far behind her.

The doctors blackwell book