On top of that, if you went to a medical school well-equipped enough to offer cadavers for dissection, the idea of a woman with her hands in a corpse was also impossible. JANICE NIMURA: The very idea of a woman sitting in a medical lecture hall studying the body in the company of men was appalling. But Elizabeth Blackwell roped in her younger sister Emily into becoming a doctor as well.Īnd Janice Nimura tells the story of their unusual childhood and complicated sisterhood in her new book 'The Doctors Blackwell.' When we spoke, I asked Nimura what was so offensive back then about a woman studying medicine. And yet, the idea of a female doctor back then was outrageous. Elizabeth Blackwell entered medical school in the 1840s, back when bloodletting, leeches and blistering were common medical treatments. But there was a time when that number was one. In 2023 she was elected to membership in the Society of American Historians.These days, women make up just more than half of all medical students in the U.S. In her second, she circles back to her first interest in medicine, in the context of her work in women’s history. Her first book grew out of her personal interest in the earliest encounters between Japan and the United States. She grew into an understanding that history is made of stories and fell in love with archival treasure-hunting, especially when it led to the forgotten lives of trailblazing nineteenth-century women. in East Asian studies at Columbia upon their return to her native New York. She thought she wanted to be a doctor, but life intervened: she majored in English at Yale, worked in publishing, moved to Japan with her Tokyo-born husband, and completed an M.A. “The one thing I know I’ll never be is a historian,” she told her college guidance counselor in 1988. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, The Rumpus, and LitHub, among other publications. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, was a New York Times Notable book in 2015.

Nimura received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Janice nimura the doctors blackwell