![]() Sadie on the women doctors of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, but the crusading doctor doesn’t make an appearance until half-way through her new novel. At the time, that part of Manhattan was home to waves of immigrants and destitute people of all backgrounds, and the hospital would have dealt with waves of diphtheria and cholera that killed the very young as well as venereal diseases that blighted the lives of those not much older. Her graduating thesis was on syphilis in young girls and she moved directly into residency at the Blackwell sisters' infirmary for the poor in Manhattan. The Blackwells' infirmary was the only hospital that would accept a woman doctor at the time - the medical field considered too crude for ladies. ![]() Sarah Fonda Mackintosh was in the first graduating class of the medical school founded by Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first women ever to practise medicine in the U.S. Her 2011 novel The Virgin Cure also has a real-life inspiration - McKay's great-great grandmother was a woman doctor who ministered to the poor in the 1870s in New York's Lower East Side. Ami McKay’s debut novel The Birth House was inspired by the former midwife’s home she and her husband bought in Nova 'Scotia near the Bay of Fundy. ![]()
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