![]() ![]() Like The Doctors Blackwell, her first book, Daughters of the Samurai, was a joint biography of women who were extraordinary for their time - in that case, young Japanese girls who were sent to the United States in the late 1800s to learn Western culture and bring that knowledge back to their home country. Nimura, who has a master’s in East Asian studies from Columbia, is known for her skill at archival treasure-hunting. But trading hagiography for historical fact is always a worthwhile enterprise, and Nimura’s impressively researched book, which makes liberal use of the subjects’ letters and journals, renders these nineteenth-century groundbreakers as complex, contradictory human beings. Nimura ’01GSAS, Elizabeth Blackwell - the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States - and her younger sister Emily, also a physician, have their feminist legacies slightly tarnished. In The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women - and Women to Medicine, a new biography by Janice P. History is filled with pioneering figures who, on closer inspection, are found to be seriously flawed. Elizabeth Blackwell (National Library of Medicine) and Emily Blackwell (New York Academy of Medicine). ![]()
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