The Untold Story of America's First Female Doctors with Janice Nimura
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You're listening to the Nocturnous Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. What was it like to be Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, the first and third women physicians in the United States? What drove them to pursue a career in medicine and what was medicine itself like in the nineteenth century? My guest today is author and historian Janice Nimora, who has spent hundreds of hours trying to answer these questions in her biography, The Doctors Blackwell. Before our conversation, I asked Janice to read an excerpt from the prologue of her book. Here is Janice
Nimora. On May 14th, 2018, a cheerful crowd of activist New Yorkers blocked the sidewalk at the corner of Bleaker and Crosby Streets. Before them stood an elderly and unremarkable building, four stories topped by a pair of attic dormers, battered brick facade obscured by a fire escape, pre hipster neighborhood bar on the ground floor. After a parade of speakers, all but one of them women, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation unveiled a commemorative plaque, the newest stop on its civil rights and social justice map. In this building it read, The first female doctor in America, Elizabeth Blackwell, established the first hospital for staffed and run by women. Applause erupted, VIPs grinned, cameras clicked.
There was a triumphant sense of reclaiming a hero, of restoring a story of female agency, of lifting for just a moment the grim political mood. Someone was selling eye popping t shirts, black and hot pink on white. Elizabeth Blackwell OGMD. The celebrants dispersed into the balmy evening, imagining the first female doctor, saintly and sepia toned, bending solicitously over her grateful patients, or maybe a fiercer version, original gangster of medical women, crusading feminist. Both images were satisfying.
Neither was accurate. So Janice, I was reading a little bit about you on your website and I saw that once upon a time you thought that you might be a doctor and then you ended up majoring in English and moving to Japan and so I'm wondering how did you come to write this book? How did you come back to the topic of medicine? Mm, good question.
You know, as you say, I I hit college determined to be pre med and then I swerved Um And then I moved to Japan and swerved even further. It was really joyful to have this incredible excuse to go back into science and the history of medicine because nineteenth century medicine is awesome. Uh and then at the same time to have my own daughter who is now a junior in college and herself pre med in a much more permanent way than I was to be watching her progress and to feel all those threads coming back together into the fabric.
So I loved the book. And one of the things that I loved most about it was the letters, the letters, the letters. Oh, the letters. And the diary entries Can you just tell me a little bit about these primary sources that you were working with? Because I found myself reading along and thinking, gosh, I wish we were writing to each other and ourselves this way in twenty twenty.
I know. What are twenty first century biographers gonna do? Or twenty second century, I guess. Yeah. So there were nine siblings, Elizabeth and Emily were two of nine, and they were deeply bonded to each other and they also all drove each other a little nuts. So they were constantly leaving each other and writing endlessly back. So the most wonderful thing about this project and the most terrifying thing was the depth of material. At the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe and at the Library of Congress, there were hundreds of thousands of pieces of material. And it was daunting to dive in there, but it was also the most incredible treasure hunt. And it was really exciting not just to try to find letters that maybe previous biographers and other researchers had overlooked, but also to get familiar enough with each sibling's
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