Hunt published her autobiography detailing fifty years of social life and twenty years of medical practice, a key primary source on women's medical history.
In 1856, Harriot Hunt published her memoir, titled Glances and Glimpses, or Fifty Years' Social including Twenty Years' Professional Life. The book combined autobiography with social commentary, chronicling her unconventional path into medicine, her repeated attempts to gain admission to formal medical education, and her involvement in reform movements including abolitionism and women's rights.
The memoir is considered an invaluable primary source for historians studying 19th-century women's entry into the medical profession, offering a first-person account of the obstacles she faced — from social ridicule to institutional rejection — and the strategies she used to build a respected medical practice despite them. It also documents her friendships and alliances with other reformers of the era, including figures in the abolitionist and suffrage movements.
Publishing such a candid professional and personal narrative was itself an act of self-assertion uncommon for women of the period, positioning Hunt as an author and public intellectual in addition to her medical and activist work. The book remains widely cited in modern scholarship on the history of American women physicians and continues to be excerpted in collections on 19th-century women's writing and medical history.