What unfolds is a tale of two women with similar backgrounds but distinctly different personalities and professional ambitions. Nimura narrates their stories with an even hand drawing upon fascinating and revealing correspondence. Emily and Elizabeth’s professional lives divide into two periods: a dozen years — roughly 1856 to 1868 — when they work together in New York establishing a dispensary, small hospital, and eventually a women’s medical college. Subsequently, from the 1870s on Emily continues her work in New York while Elizabeth moves back to England for the rest of her life.
Working with primary sources, Nimura documents the courage, drive, and training that the sisters drew upon to establish the dispensary and hospital. They had no personal wealth. Their mission was not merely to aid women who were ill but to educate them in the power of hygiene and sanitation at a time when it was not understood that germs caused illness. (Such understanding came only later after Louis Pasteur conducted experiments that would show the relationship between germs and disease, and later still when Robert Koch demonstrated that a particular germ could cause a specific illness.) Indeed, they were teaching hygiene to mothers at a time when doctors rarely washed their hands between patients.
One fascinating aspect of this biography is how men become less and less important in what Elizabeth and Emily do as physicians and reformers. Elizabeth debates the role of women in medicine as nurses or doctors not with men, but with the famous Crimean War nurse, Florence Nightingale. She and Emily believe in coeducational medical education but ultimately start a women’s medical school. They are sustained in the grueling work of running round-the-clock clinical facilities by dedicated women colleagues without whom their work would not have succeeded. And when Elizabeth settles permanently in England, she virtually abandons clinical work in order to write and lecture as a reformer on a wide-ranging series of questions including sanitation, vaccination, and female promiscuity. (Elizabeth’s most widely read book was her 1879 Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of their Children in Relation to Sex.)
The Blackwell sisters opened doctoring to women a full generation before any American women gained entrance to the profession of law. One of the first of these legal pioneers, Belva Lockwood, attended law school in Washington, DC in the early 1870s, winning bar admission in 1873. In the United States, as elsewhere, women interested in law or medicine faced similar barriers in obtaining an education, credentialing, mentoring, job access, and job advancement. Women in each of these professions were also similar in the broad and creative use of their training and experience. Lockwood maintained a general law practice for fifty years but she also wrote and lectured extensively just as Elizabeth Blackwell was doing. While the Blackwell’s started a medical school for women two of Lockwood’s female colleagues in Washington opened a women’s law school.
There is excitement in reading The Doctors Blackwell; an energy derived from learning about wanting to do good and succeeding in doing so; an energy derived from reading about women who committed their lives to changing both who practiced medicine, and how it was practiced. These are women upon whose shoulders we stand, from whom we learn the price and rewards of bringing change.
Pages: 1 · 2
More Articles
- Medicare Advantage Increasingly Popular With Seniors — But Not Hospitals and Doctors
- Kaiser Health News*: May 11th Era of ‘Free’ Covid Vaccines, Test Kits, and Treatments Is Ending. Who Will Pay the Tab Now?
- Center for Strategic and International Studies: “The Future Outlook with Dr. Anthony Fauci”
- Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF): Over 200,000 Residents and Staff in Long-Term Care Facilities Have Died From COVID-19
- Exclusive: Over 900 Health Workers Have Died of COVID-19; Memorializing Every US Health Care Worker Who Dies During the Pandemic and the Toll Is Rising
- An Interview With Mikaela Bernhardt, A Maker of Challah Loaves for CoronaVirus Hospital Workers
- Oklahoma’s ‘Precedent-Setting’ Suit Puts Opioid Drugmakers On Trial, With a Judge and No Jury
- Dr. Abraham Verghese On The Charm, Magic and Importance Of The Bedside Manner
- CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention): 6 Things You Need to Know About This Flu Season
- National Institutes of Health Twitter Chat: The Importance of Clinical Trials and The Clinical Research Process