For this installment of Pioneering Women of Civil War America ~ The Blackwells, we look into the lives of two monumental women in American history. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first (1849) and her sister Emily the third (1854) amongst women to earn medical degrees in the United States. Although Lydia Folger Fowler was the second woman to earn a medical degree in the United States (1850), she stakes a claim as the first American since the Blackwell sisters were British born. In this highly informative video titled The Doctors Blackwell, the Westport Public Library brings together Janice P. Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine, and Dr. Perri Klass, author and professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University, to discuss Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. The video runs for 56 minutes with two parts: In the first 18 minutes, Author Nimura contrasts the personal and professional characteristics of these two sisters and how each woman found their way to and made their eternal mark on the medical profession; in the remaining 38 minutes, Dr.Klass interviews Author Nimura, helping to exhume more interesting tidbits about the profoundly intellectual Blackwell sisters, including their doctoring around and the medicine of Civil War times.

Happy Viewing,

Lisa Y. Potocar

If you would like to read a more condensed article about Doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, along with the above-mentioned Lydia Folger Fowler, please visit my author’s blog, “Pioneering Women of Civil War America,” at: https://lisapotocarauthor.com/my-blog/