Conversations: Janice Nimura
Synopsis
Emily talks to biographer Janice Nimura about her new book, The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine To Women—And Women To Medicine, which examines the complicated and exceptional lives of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, the first and third female physicians in the United States.
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Guest
Photo by Lucy Schaeffer
Janice P. Nimura received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, was a New York Times Notable book in 2015. 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.
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Produced by Emily Silverman and Adelaide Papazoglou.
Edited and mixed by Jon Oliver.
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TRANSCRIPT
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The Nocturnists: Conversations
Emily in Conversation with Janice Nimura
Episode Transcript
Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.
Emily Silverman
You're listening to The Nocturnists: 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 19th century? My guest today is author and historian, Janice Nimura, 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 Nimura.
Janice Nimura
"On May 14, 2018, a cheerful crowd of activist New Yorkers blocked the sidewalk at the corner of Bleecker 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, OG, MD.' 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."
Emily Silverman
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?
Janice Nimura
Good question. You know, as you say, I hit college determined to be pre-med, and then I swerved. 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 19th century medicine is awesome. 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.
Emily Silverman
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 2020.”
Janice Nimura
I know. What are 21st century biographers going to do? Or 22nd 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 handwriting and preoccupations and funny quirks, and be able to kind of tease apart their various takes on things and also read multiple takes on the same event. So, multiple family members reacting to Elizabeth Blackwell's graduation from medical school–something like that. To have that richness of primary material was really a great gift. I am sure that there are bits that I missed, but I think that's what every biographer feels, is that you can never be sure that you got it all.
Emily Silverman
Okay, so Elizabeth: first woman physician in America. I'm sort of obsessed with doctor origin stories here at The Nocturnists. Like, usually when someone comes on for an interview, one of the first things I ask is, "Tell me about your path to medicine." And of course, Elizabeth is no exception. And you say in the book that her origin story was sort of vague and abrupt. Tell us more about that.
Janice Nimura
So the, the kind of mythological origin story is that Elizabeth Blackwell had a female friend who was dying of an unspecified, but probably gynecological, cancer. And confided to Elizabeth that had she had access to a female physician, her mortification and embarrassment and discomfort would have been much less. That's kind of what you read over and over again in the sort of children's biographies. I think what's probably more accurate is that that might have catalyzed things, but that Elizabeth Blackwell was an intellectually very hungry person, and a, socially, quite an awkward person. And she saw herself as someone who could be important. She saw herself as someone who had the potential to be a beacon. And she, you know, in the 1840s, in the intellectual circles that her family moved in, she came across the writing of Margaret Fuller, who was one of the transcendentalists. She was a rather prominent journalist and editor, and she had just written a bestseller called, Woman in the 19th Century, which was all about how humanity could not become enlightened, truly, until women claimed their own power and proved that women could be anything they wanted to be by virtue of talent and toil. It had nothing to do with gender–it had to do with your own skills and energy. That women could be sea captains, said Margaret Fuller. And Elizabeth, hearing this, I think, really felt like she could be one of those women that Margaret Fuller was talking about. And that medicine was, oddly, an interesting pathway to prove Margaret Fuller's points, because at this point medicine itself was in transition. It had been sort of a trade plied by healers and midwives and barber surgeons. It was increasingly a profession plied by men who had, increasingly, a diploma from a medical school. And there were increasingly medical schools in America. So it seemed to her that if she could find herself at a medical school and study all the courses and pass all the examinations, it would be an unusually quantitative way of saying, "There's no way you can tell me I'm not qualified to be a doctor. I can do everything the men are doing." So that seemed like a viable path to prove a point. Elizabeth was not really interested in being a healer. She didn't really like people all that much. She loved her family, but she was a bit of a misanthrope. And you know, the idea of offering nurturing help to other humans wasn't really what was driving her.
Emily Silverman
Yeah, I just jotted down a couple of quotes from the book, from her letters. And one of them says, "I must have some object in life which will fill this vacuum and prevent the sad wearing away of the heart." Or, this other quote, where she says, "The idea of winning a medical degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle."
Janice Nimura
Right, and specifically that quote, that first one you chose, about the wearing away of the heart, I think what she was thinking about when she wrote that was the kind of mawkish sentimentality of love and marriage. She was really kind of repulsed by sentimentality. And I think, being a fairly awkward person, hadn't had much success with intimate connection with other people outside of her family. And I think she was somebody who was quite proud and quite ambitious, and wasn't interested in trying and failing at the marriage game. And so, choosing this incredible quest as she put it, to become a doctor, at once, you know, appealed to her ambition, and also was a way of answering the people who were saying, "Why aren't you looking for a husband?" It was easier to say, "I'm not looking for a husband because I have this calling. It's higher." Where, I think, many people become doctors to heal fellow humans, she really was becoming a doctor to heal humanity. She thought on those terms, and with no embarrassment. She really thought big.
Emily Silverman
Speaking of medical education at the time, Elizabeth came of age before germ theory. And during a time where this question of, as you put it, what comprised legitimate and effective medical treatment and medical education was still very much up in the air. So for the audience, can you paint a picture of what was being taught in medical schools at the time? Like, what did medical education look like?
Janice Nimura
It looked startlingly like it had looked for millennia. In a lot of ways, cutting-edge medical education in the late 1840s would not have been totally unfamiliar to Galen, and, and the practitioners of humoral medicine. The four humors, you know, needed to be in balance in order to preserve health. There were no real diagnostic tools, there was no way of seeing what was happening inside the body. Anatomical dissection was coming along, but wasn't necessarily something that most practitioners were super familiar with. So, when someone was ill, there were a bunch of remedies in the toolkit, things that were kind of horrifying, like bloodletting, and laudanum and mercury-based calomel. Things that make you, would make you throw up. Or enemas. Or make you sweat or bleed or, or, or cough up. So basically it was: if something is going wrong inside, let's get it out. And it was an era of what's called “heroic medicine,” where the practitioners who seemed most successful were, were usually the ones who got the most visible results. And visible results weren't necessarily healing. They could just be, "The doctor gave me a potion, and, and things happened." So, it was, it was a kind of groping medicine, where a doctor would try every remedy in their toolkit until the patient either recovered or died.
And medical school itself was not practical training. Medical school itself consisted of two sixteen-week terms that were identical to each other. You did one from, sort of, November to February one year, and then you left and tried to scrape together some practical training somewhere else. And then you came back and did the same thing again the following year. And then you were a doctor, often really never having touched a patient. The lectures were purely watching, taking notes. Sometimes, in a well-equipped medical school, you'd be working on a cadaver, but medical graduates emerged with a shocking level of ignorance. So yeah, it was, a, kind of a horrifying moment from the perspective of the present. But Elizabeth was unusually aware of the limitations of medicine. In the summer between her medical school terms, she went to apprentice herself at Blockley Almshouse in Philadelphia, a huge public hospital, and wrote home to her family, you know, "It's for sure that if I ever got sick, none of these doctor types would come anywhere near me. I would trust to fresh air, clean water, and God before I trusted medicine." So, you know, that's where we’re coming from here. And in fact, the advances that happened shortly after germ theory–antisepsis, Lister, all, all that–Elizabeth wasn't particularly receptive to a lot of that stuff. The hygiene part she, she definitely approved of, but germ theory was alien to her and, in fact, a little contradictory in her head. Because, to her, health was an outgrowth of moral behavior. And so the idea that an amoral germ could be causing an epidemic–that was hard for her.
Emily Silverman
Yeah, the idea of evidence-based medicine was definitely not a thing. And I just thought it was so fascinating to read about all of the alternative modes of healing that were out there, like the hydrotherapy and the mesmerism. And I sort of expected Elizabeth to reject those things, especially because her sister was one of those people who was always, you know, glomming on to the hot new health trend. But Elizabeth was actually more open to those types of therapies than I expected.
Janice Nimura
That's right. That's right. Yeah I mean, I think that's when it's really important as somebody who's trying to tell a story from the distant past, not to impose your own knowledge. Elizabeth had no way of knowing which of these things were going to turn out to be valid. She had her suspicions, but she couldn't immediately be dismissive of anything, starting with things like phrenology, the science of feeling the bumps on the skull and devining certain things about character from that. You know, she had herself phrenologized as a teenager, and, and of course the phrenologist's report was very flattering to her, so she was inclined to accept it. But as you say, her sister Anna, who was a Class A drama queen, and, and a rather, I think, emotionally unhealthy person that sort of glommed on to all of these fads, one after another. And Elizabeth sort of used her as a way of educating herself in these alternative therapies. And never, even though she had her skepticisms and she had her moments of rolling her eyes, at the same time when she would get to know these alternative practitioners through her sister, she admired them in a certain way. She admired their convictions, she admired the fact that they really felt called to these different techniques. And since she hadn't seen that accredited doctors really had anything better to offer, she really suspected that, I mean, and she was right in a way, that the hygenic techniques that the alternative therapists were promoting were exactly right. You know, hygiene was important. That was something that Elizabeth caught on to earlier than a lot of people.
Emily Silverman
And interestingly, when she gets this eye infection, and she's laid up for days having people drip chemicals into her eyes trying to salvage them, she goes off to one of these hydrotherapy centers herself, hoping that maybe it would help her out. And it actually doesn't work, but she was open enough to give it a try.
Janice Nimura
Definitely. And that's one of the moments in the story that, to me, is just the most riveting. You know, here's Elizabeth, not only has she gotten herself a medical degree, she's taking herself off to France. She's sort of ensconced herself in La Maternité, which was the largest public maternity hospital in Paris, to learn to, you know, to have a volume of cases go by. And she ends up with this horrible eye infection, you know, no antibiotics then. And then, having failed to really recover and still hoping that she could recover the use of her eye, but not having had had any success yet, she up and takes herself halfway across Europe by herself, by stagecoach. She's ill, she's emaciated, she's exhausted and she can barely see out of her good eye. And she goes from Paris all the way to Silesia, which is on the border of then Czechoslovakia and Poland. All the political boundaries have shifted a lot, but all the way to the edge of Eastern Europe, to have a stay at this hydrotherapy spa that's run by this sort of peasant who had an inspiration and founded this, this spa where the rich and famous would go to try and heal themselves. I mean in, at the time, women didn't usually travel by themselves, let alone deathly ill. So you know, it was–it's such an illustration to me of the kind of core of steel this woman had, that carried her along.
Emily Silverman
Absolutely. And she makes her way through medical school, and she encounters allies and she encounters foes, often in the form of men. But what was most interesting to me was actually her encounters with women. And, you know, the impulse is to assume that she would link up with the other feminists of her time and share their views. But, she actually had a very special brand of feminism, where she would be like, in school or something, and hear a bunch of girls giggling down the hallway. And she would hear the sound of the giggling and it would almost make her, like, upset. Like, she felt like the young girls were–I think she uses the word or maybe you use the word–frivolous, enslaved by ignorance, and weak for not desiring more. And it was just remarkable to me how much onus she really put on the woman to sort of unearth her own desires and go after them. I just thought that was really fascinating.
Janice Nimura
Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, she was a misogynist. She was, she was definitely a feminist, but she was also not particularly admiring of other women. And I think that, to me, is one of the things that I really feel is at the center of the value of this story. This is still a problem today. Our fiercest feminist impulses are always twinned with weird shadows of misogyny that I don't think we are all able to recognize or call out sometimes. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, her sister, you know, once they were both doctors–forget about frivolous schoolgirls–they were remarkably dismissive, even of other women who had chosen to pursue medicine. Because, you know, they had struggled to get where they were, and the idea that someone less serious than themselves might taint their achievement was impossible. Not happening. You know, I always refer to Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell as the first and third women doctors in America, which of course always begs the question, well, who was the second one? The second one was a woman named Nancy Talbot Clark, whose achievement in getting a medical degree at this point was just as extraordinary as the Blackwell sisters. They always referred to her as “little Mrs. Clark.” And not in a nice way. They were very wary of her, and very quick to distance themselves and make sure that whatever she was doing was not going to get in their way. And it's both startling, and, at a certain level, understandable and recognizable, certainly in the behavior of people all around us today. And I think it's really important to look squarely at that, both then and now.
Emily Silverman
I agree. And I love the part of the book where it says her philosophy was too conservative for the reformers and too progressive for the conservatives.
Janice Nimura
Right. And, you know, this is a woman whose brothers married two of the most prominent women's rights advocates of the day, Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown. And although she loved them as sisters-in-law, she was very wary of them as women. She really was not an advocate of women's suffrage. She, you know, the women's rights movement, I think, you know, looked at her and said, "Come and join us and, you know, be part of, of what we're doing." And she very explicitly turned her back and said, "I don't believe in votes for women until women have proved that they can think independently. If you give a vote to a woman now, it's just another vote for her husband, or her father or brother. What we need to do is unleash our own power before we are given other powers," which was not a popular stance with people like Lucy Stone. It's an interesting dynamic.
Emily Silverman
It's a very interesting dynamic and just reflects the diversity of ways to think about feminism and women's rights.
Emily Silverman
Let's talk a little bit about Emily. So Emily is Elizabeth's younger sister. She's the third woman doctor in America. And I love the contrast between them because they have a lot in common, but they're also different in a lot of ways. So tell us about Emily. How did she end up coming along on the ride?
Janice Nimura
So there were nine Blackwell's. There were five girls. And Elizabeth quickly identified Emily, her younger sister, as the most intellectually talented of the lot. And I think Elizabeth recognized very quickly that if she was going to pursue this first woman in medicine thing, it was going to be a very lonely and steep path to walk, and it would be nice to have company. So she kind of anointed Emily, said, "Emily, you shall study medicine." And Emily, although no slouch, had grown up with three older sisters who were bossy as heck. And I think, was accustomed to doing what her sisters suggested. And so she said, "Okay, that seems like a good challenge. I will, I will follow you." Of course, Elizabeth graduated from tiny rural Geneva Medical College in 1849, at which point medical schools all over America slammed their doors even harder against women. A woman had actually made her way in and succeeded! Oh, God! We better be careful not to let that happen again. So when Emily came along five years later, looking for a spot in a medical school, even Geneva College said, "No, no, no, no, please don't come here." And Emily struggled even harder, in some ways, to achieve a medical degree. She started out at Rush, in Chicago, and after the one term was asked not to return. They shut her down halfway through her degree. And she ended up having to struggle and find a second medical school to do her second term at. And that ended up being Case Western, what is now Case Western in Cleveland. So, you know, she struggled just as hard. And then to complete her training she went to Edinburgh, and apprenticed with James Young Simpson, who was one of the biggest personalities in medicine in the UK. A really prominent man that discovered that chloroform could be used as an anesthetic, a physician to the Queen, a big deal at the University of Edinburgh. And he was a bit of a showman and, I think, kind of enjoyed the shock value of having a woman among his assistants. But at the same time, he respected her, and taught her a great deal. And she ended up really taking to the science of medicine. She was, she was a naturalist. She really embraced the intellectual side and the technological side. She was really interested in surgical technique, and became much more of a practitioner than Elizabeth ever did.
Emily Silverman
Right. Emily became a surgeon, and did a lot of dirty work and a lot of practical work, and yet was clouded by self-doubt in a way that Elizabeth never was. It's just such an interesting duo of women, who then paired up to form this hospital. So, tell us about Elizabeth and Emily's Hospital in New York and what it was about that hospital that made it so special.
Janice Nimura
Right so, you know, when Elizabeth finished her training in Europe and came back to New York, she expected to hang out a shingle and start a practice and make some money. And that didn't happen, because no women would come to see a woman doctor. Because the idea of the very phrase 'female physician' meant abortionist, you know, from the underworld. So calling yourself a female physician inspired confidence in nobody, and nobody came. So after a while, she ended up opening, first, a dispensary, and then eventually, once Emily had finished medical school, they together opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children in a building which still stands on the corner of Bleecker and Crosby, as I mentioned in the prologue. And that was the first hospital staffed entirely by women. And their idea there was not only to make it possible for poor women to have free medical care administered by women doctors, but also to make a space for the slowly-increasing numbers of female medical graduates to have a place to train. Because, hospitals didn't really want female medical graduates and they, they needed practical training. Elizabeth and Emily never intended to open a women's medical college. They believed the idea of separate women's medical colleges was awful and mediocre. But, as women's medical colleges opened, there were vanishingly few opportunities for women to get what the Blackwells thought of as an excellent medical education because the men's medical colleges all said, "Well, there's a woman's medical college, go there. Don't come here."
And so finally, frustrated by the mediocre medical education that was available to women at women's medical colleges, Elizabeth and Emily opened their own women's medical college, but made it more rigorous than the men's colleges. So that was, that was the birth of that sort of twin institution, the New York Infirmary and its Women's Medical College, which, as soon as the Women's Medical College was founded–this is now 1869–those institutions really became Emily's institutions. Because, as soon as they were founded, and as soon as that milestone had been reached, Elizabeth basically left. She had always preferred Britain to America. And she left and moved to England and never came back. And so for the next 40 years, Emily ran those institutions herself, and ironically, preserved the Blackwell legacy, almost to her own detriment. People always remembered those institutions as founded by Elizabeth Blackwell, even though she had split basically as soon as they were founded.
Emily Silverman
I love Emily so much. She's such a rock. But I also love Elizabeth for her restlessness and her fire and just how she's never satisfied and always ready to move on to the next thing. I just love both of them. [MUSIC]
Emily Silverman
I wanted to take a moment and talk about Elizabeth and her relationship to sex. Because I thought it was so fascinating. First of all, I love the scene where she goes to the church, and she's looking at this painting. And it's Correggio’s “Io Embraced by Jupiter.” And it's this woman who's not embraced by a man and a body, but rather is embraced by this, like, formless godlike entity. And Elizabeth sees it and she's, like, yes, that, that is my sexuality. And just kind of thinking about that and thinking about how she educated women about their bodies, and about sex, and sexuality. And yet, she also had this very moralistic stance around sex. Talk a little bit about how she dealt with that.
Janice Nimura
No, it is, it's really hard to unpack. She was, as you say, really interested in making sure that women understood their own body mechanics–how the plumbing worked–and then at the same time she, you know, this is a woman who is teaching women about reproduction and how to raise children healthfully, and she never had a partner of her own. She adopted a daughter but she never had a child. And the painting that you describe, you know, this is, this is a moment just after she's lost an eye. And she's had this very intense experience of being tended to by one of the physicians at La Maternité who was a friend, a rather attractive young man named Hippolyte Blot. I love his name. And, you know, I think she had, she had a bit of a thing for him. But felt like, you know, she couldn't turn her attention that way, she was called to be a doctor and dallying with a man was not, not in the cards for her. And just after this very intense emotional experience, she encounters this painting, which is all about, you know, a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy being embraced, essentially, by a cloud. With none of the pain of disease, or childbirth, or abuse, or, you know, sexual inequality, that marriage brought with it in that era. So you know, it’s this incredibly divine, pure understanding of sex. And then, in her public health work, and her sort of campaigns against venereal disease, she was at once very Victorian in that she didn't really want to think about the reality of sex, but at the same time, she wanted parents to talk to their children about the sexual act and its purity–to educate their children toward honoring the sexual act. That it should only be experienced in marriage, that, to try and fight against prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases. So there's, there are paradoxes everywhere in this.
Emily Silverman
And that book that she wrote, the Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children, in Relation to Sex. It was her most popular work.
Janice Nimura
Right. You know, and that, that's such a paradox, right? In order to protect your children against immoral behavior, and in order to teach them about the exalted divinity of the procreative act, you have to talk to them about sex. But, you know, that, I don't think that's something she ever really resolved in her own head. I mean, her own relationship with this woman, Kitty Barry Blackwell, her adopted daughter, is interestingly odd in itself. I mean, this is a girl that she adopted at the age of six or seven, as an orphan, to sort of keep her company and be a strange mixture of daughter and servant. And Kitty was never free to pursue a career or a husband. She remained basically an acolyte of Elisabeth's for her entire life. And I contrast that–I mean, Elizabeth's strange and sort of rigid and religiously-inflected ideas about sex–I contrast them so much with Emily's. Emily, who, you know, for the last three decades of her life lived with a female partner, and herself adopted a daughter, with whom she had a much more normal mother-daughter relationship. A daughter who went on to marry and give Emily grandchildren. That's one of the central ways that I see the differences in their fundamental personalities.
Emily Silverman
I want to bring us into the present day, because there's been a lot of conversations happening around women in medicine and having equity in the profession. And women, obviously not getting paid as much as men and having to carry a lot of the invisible labor in hospitals and clinics, and sort of being expected to do work for free and things like that. And at the same time, there's also articles coming out about how women actually spend more time with patients than men. And there's a study that shows that women physicians actually have better outcomes than men. And again, you know, these studies may be imperfect, but it's a question that's sort of bubbling up, like, does gender have anything to do with it?
Janice Nimura
Well, I'm very hesitant to even comment, mostly because I'm not a physician. And I don't want to presume to understand what it feels like to be a female physician. It's not in my experience. But I have done a lot of thinking about this, you know, and so did Elizabeth and Emily. You know, they were striving in a moment where they had to be as much like male physicians as possible in order not to be dismissed by the male profession. So they started at that. And then, I think Elizabeth diverged a bit and began to see the unique and distinct role of a female physician as being a teacher armed with science. And I think a lot of things drove her in this direction, not least of which was the loss of one eye that prevented her from practicing at a certain level. But she really saw a female doctor's role as instructing the public in health, which is much more of a public health policy role than a practicing role. I think Emily didn't see there being a distinct role for a woman doctor. She really felt like her job was to be as excellent as any of her male colleagues in terms of practice, surgery, professorship at her medical school, whatever that was. Just from a patient perspective in the present, as somebody who has had two children and seen a lot of doctors, I think that sometimes those ideas that women might have the edge on empathy, or the patience for medical narrative and storytelling more than their male colleagues–there's some truth in there. At the same time, I'm also blessed in my life with a lot of men who are just as empathetic as any woman I know. So it's very hard to draw deep conclusions. But I do think that the stereotype of a woman being readier to listen and, and feel, is useful for male and female practitioners alike. I'm really intrigued by the whole concept of narrative medicine, this idea of storytelling and health being inextricably entwined.
Emily Silverman
So, let's say we could perform a miracle and resurrect Elizabeth and Emily, and we could all go out for some coffee. If you could ask them anything, what would it be?
Janice Nimura
Wow. I would ask both of them, but mostly Elizabeth, if, looking back, they believed that medicine had been the right path to choose. I would ask each of them separately whether it had been the thing that fulfilled Margaret Fuller's exhortation to unleash female power, and whether it had been satisfying for them on either that ideological level or on the scientific level.
Emily Silverman
Well, I just want to thank you so much for writing this book. I'm so happy that I read it. I'm so happy that now I get to be friends with Elizabeth and Emily, whereas before I didn't even know that they existed. And for everybody listening, whether you're a history buff, or a medical student, or a physician, or especially if you're a woman physician, pick up The Doctors Blackwell, by Janice Nimura.
Janice Nimura
Thank you so much, Emily.