'Doctors Blackwell' Tells The Story Of 2 Pioneering Sisters Who Changed Medicine

In the 1840s, Elizabeth Blackwell was admitted to a U.S. medical school — in part because the male students thought her application was part of an elaborate prank. She persisted and got her degree, becoming the first American woman to do so. A few years later, her younger sister Emily followed in her footsteps, earning her own medical degree from the institution that would become Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Biographer Janice Nimura tells the sisters' story in the new book, The Doctors Blackwell. Nimura says Elizabeth was "greeted with everything from rejection to hilarity" during her years at Geneva Medical College in upstate New York.