“’I wish some skillful pen would produce an interesting old maid’s life,’ sighed 17-year-old Elizabeth Blackwell in 1838, at a time when that idea was as much a contradiction in terms as "female physician." Janice Nimura has splendidly granted the adolescent wish. Deftly, with a keen eye, she has resurrected Blackwell and her physician sister Emily in all their feisty, thrilling, trailblazing splendor.” - Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches

“The Blackwell sisters took on the medical establishment and won. They are heroines, not just of their time, but for every age. Their incredible story has been crying out to be told, and in Janice Nimura they have the ideal biographer. The Blackwell’s live and triumph again.” - Dr. Amanda Foreman, author of The Duchess

“Janice Nimura has gifted us with more than a splendid history of the Blackwell sisters. Gripping, vividly written, and moving, it is also a surprisingly timely history of the misogynist, limited, still evolving Anglo-American medical profession.” - Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Rosevelt: Volume I-III

“All doctors and all patients owe a debt to these eccentric determined brilliant characters, Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who found their way across the strange and bloody landscape of nineteenth-century medicine, and transformed it forever, all brilliantly conjured in Janice Nimura's wonderful book.” - Dr. Perri Klass, author of A Good Time to be Born