A metrotome sounds like a more pleasant device than it is. A switchblade of sorts, it was once used to treat fertility issues. A doctor would push the metrotome into a woman’s uterus, press the handle, and release the blade; when he pulled it out, it cut through one side of her cervix. After that, the doctor reinserted the tool and repeated the procedure on the other side. Eventually a version of the metrotome was made with a double blade that could cut both sides of the cervix at once—a supposed improvement on the original design.
Elizabeth Blackwell did not approve of metrotomes, or much of anything else that male doctors recommended for female patients in the nineteenth century. When one of her relatives faced the prospect of being treated with one, she argued for less invasive interventions and cautioned that the scarring resulting from the procedure might make pregnancy even less likely. Blackwell, who was born in England in 1821, and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child, was America’s first female doctor. Her younger sister Emily was the third. Although neither sibling was especially interested in women’s health, the lack of opportunities available to them in the field of medicine meant that they mostly treated female patients and were often limited to obstetric and gynecological care. In order to expand their practice, they opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women, which went on to treat more than a million patients in its first hundred years.
The Blackwells were medical pioneers, but, except for a few professional awards named in their honor and a plaque commemorating the location of their infirmary, they have largely been forgotten. A new biography by the writer Janice P. Nimura, “The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine” (Norton), attempts to redress that situation by considering their lives in the broader history of medicine and social reform. It is an admirable project, even though, as the story of the Blackwells makes clear, context is not always flattering.