NetGalley Review: The Doctors Blackwell by Janice P. Nimura

This was everything you want in a biography.  Extensively researched and well-written, the history of the Blackwells, and 19th century medicine as whole, is presented in an extremely readable fashion.  The narrative weaves together many big names of the times, deftly discusses the intersections of the women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements, and provides a compassionate, though unvarnished, history of these first woman MDs.  

While the accomplishments of the Blackwells sisters are impressive, Nimura doesn’t whitewash or editorialize the ways in which they benefited from immense privilege, even by 19th century standards.  The sisters were marketed as progressive intellectuals, but the historical record shows that they were happy to compromise their principles of abolition or women’s rights when it served their higher purpose.  Working with Sims, training on slave owning estates, not supporting suffrage, intellectualism, classism, and not exactly lifting up other women behind them- the family isn’t the perfect paragons of progress and readers will appreciate that nuance.  

For a thorough history of medicine, social movements, and the women who paved the way for future MDs, this is a great biography.