Reading guide for The Doctors Blackwell by Janice P. Nimura

Reading Guide Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Which sister, Elizabeth or Emily, resonated more strongly with you? Why?
2. None of the five Blackwell sisters married, while their brothers chose strikingly independent women as partners. Why do you think this was?
3. What were the origins of Elizabeth's interest in the newborn field of public health?
4. How did Emily's ideas about the role of a female physician diverge from Elizabeth's?
5. How did the Blackwell sisters feel about women's rights, or other women in general?
6. Nineteenth-century medicine looked very different from modern practice, but like today the pace of innovation was rapid. What did you find most startling about the Blackwells' medical training—and which of our techniques will seem quaint or barbaric in the future?
7. The Blackwells interacted, sometimes intimately,with some of the most famous figures of their day: Florence Nightingale, Henry Ward Beecher, Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison, Lady Byron, Henry Whitney Bellows, even Abraham Lincoln. Yet comparatively few people are familiar with the Blackwell story today. Why?
8. How have the challenges faced by women doctors changed over time? Which issues, in the present, would surprise the Blackwell sisters, and which would they recognize from their own lives?
9. The Blackwell story is easiest to find on the children's biography shelf, with Elizabeth often depicted as a slim, attractive young woman with a stethoscope, leaning solicitously over a grateful patient. If you read one of these inspirational stories as a child, how was it different from The Doctors Blackwell? What do the children's versions leave out, and why?
10. Have we made progress in our ability to accept and embrace powerful or pioneering women?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of W.W. Norton & Company. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.