Born in Nagasaki in 1827 as the daughter of Siebold and Kusumoto Taki, a courtesan of Nagasaki's Maruyama district. Her father was banished from Japan when she was two, and she was raised thereafter by her mother and grandmother. She studied Western medicine and obstetrics under her father's disciple Ninomiya Keisaku, a physician of the Uwajima domain, and then under the Dutch naval doctor Pompe van Meerdervoort, who arrived in the late Edo period. She was among the first Japanese women to study Western medicine formally. In 1862 she observed a human dissection at the Nagasaki Yōjōsho — a first for a Japanese woman. In 1873 she attended the delivery of Hamuro Mitsuko, a concubine of Emperor Meiji; it was a stillbirth. She went on to serve as an imperial household attendant in charge of medical care for court ladies. In her later years she ran an obstetric clinic in Tokyo, dying in 1903 at 77. She is remembered as a pioneer among Japanese female physicians and as a woman who endured an age of upheaval.

Strong-willed and tenacious. The prejudice against her mixed heritage, the prejudice against female physicians, and the aftermath of her father's incident — she turned back this triple adversity over the course of a lifetime. She combined the scholarly integrity inherited from her father with the core strength inherited from her mother.

Ine is remembered as 'Japan's first female physician' (with Ogino Ginko later obtaining the formal license), and especially as an obstetrician she opened the way for later women doctors. Living as a woman of mixed heritage in 19th-century Japanese society — doubly a minority — her life is now being reappraised from feminist perspectives. She is commemorated at the Siebold Memorial Museum in Nagasaki and at Ninomiya Keisaku-related sites in Uwajima. Repeatedly depicted in novels and dramas, she is inscribed in cultural memory as a woman emblematic of the late-Edo and Meiji transition.