Ann Levin
Special to USA TODAY
On a dreary Monday morning in the fall of 1847, 26-year-old Elizabeth Blackwell showed up for class at Geneva Medical College in upstate New York, en route to becoming the first woman in America to receive a medical degree. Five years later, her younger sister Emily would earn one of her own. Over the next two decades the two women would go on to establish the first hospital run for and by women, and the first women’s medical college with training as rigorous as that received by men.
Despite all these firsts, the remarkable story of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell isn’t particularly well known. Now, historian Janice P. Nimura has written “The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women – and Women to Medicine” (Norton, 336 pp., ★★★ out of four), a fascinating dual biography that restores the two sisters to their rightful place in U.S. history and illuminates a period riven like our own with bitter disagreements over race, public health and medicine, and the role of women in society.