The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

by Janice P. Nimura

A dual biography of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, the United States’ first female physicians and the founders of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, a hospital staffed entirely by women in antebellum America. Through the story of their lives, says the Wall Street Journal, we encounter “a rough-hewn, gaudy, carnival-barking America, with only the thinnest veneer of gentility overlaying cruelty and a simmering violence.”