The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

Janice P. Nimura is an American author. She earned a B.A. in English from Yale and worked in publishing before moving to Japan with her husband, who was born in Tokyo. She later returned to New York and received an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Columbia. Her first book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back (2015), focuses on the lives of three Japanese girls who were sent to America for the Iwakura Mission from 1871 to 1882: Sutematsu Yamakawa, Ume Tsuda, and Shige Nagai. The book drew from letters from the girls to their families and American friends, including Alice Bacon, a writer, educator, and foreign advisor to Japan in the Meiji period. The book received praise for Nimura’s depiction of the girls and was listed as a New York Times notable book. In addition to The Doctors Blackwell being a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography, it also won Nimura the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Public Scholar Award. In addition to her two published books, Nimura has written essays and reviews for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian, and LitHub.