A History of Women in Medicine
A History of Women in Medicine

Author: Sinéad Spearing

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1526714310

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A study of the female healers of centuries past, and how they went from respected to reviled. Witch is a powerful word with humble origins. Once used to describe an ancient British tribe known for its unique class of female physicians and priestesses, it grew into something grotesque, diabolical, and dangerous. A History of Women in Medicine reveals the untold story of forgotten female physicians, their lives, practices, and subsequent denomination as witches. Originally held in high esteem in their communities, these women used herbs and ancient psychological processes to relieve the suffering of their patients, often traveling long distances, moving from village to village. Their medical and spiritual knowledge blended the boundaries between physician and priest. These ancient healers were the antithesis of the witch figure of today; instead they were knowledgeable therapists commanding respect, gratitude, and high social status. In this pioneering work, Sinéad Spearing draws on current archeological evidence, literature, folklore, case studies, and original religious documentation to bring to life these forgotten healers. By doing so she also exposes the Church’s efforts to demonize them in the eyes of the world, leading female healers to be labeled witches and persecuted in the ensuing hysteria known today as the European witch craze.

This Side of Doctoring
This Side of Doctoring

Author: Eliza Lo Chin

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13:

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This anthology of stories, poems, essays and quotations explores the duality of being both a woman and a physician.

The Changing Face of Medicine
The Changing Face of Medicine

Author: Ann K. Boulis

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-06-15

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0801463505

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The number of women practicing medicine in the United States has grown steadily since the late 1960s, with women now roughly at parity with men among entering medical students. Why did so many women enter American medicine? How are women faring, professionally and personally, once they become physicians? Are women transforming the way medicine is practiced? To answer these questions, The Changing Face of Medicine draws on a wide array of sources, including interviews with women physicians and surveys of medical students and practitioners. The analysis is set in the twin contexts of a rapidly evolving medical system and profound shifts in gender roles in American society. Throughout the book, Ann K. Boulis and Jerry A. Jacobs critically examine common assumptions about women in medicine. For example, they find that women's entry into medicine has less to do with the decline in status of the profession and more to do with changes in women's roles in contemporary society. Women physicians' families are becoming more and more like those of other working women. Still, disparities in terms of specialty, practice ownership, academic rank, and leadership roles endure, and barriers to opportunity persist. Along the way, Boulis and Jacobs address a host of issues, among them dual-physician marriages, specialty choice, time spent with patients, altruism versus materialism, and how physicians combine work and family. Women's presence in American medicine will continue to grow beyond the 50 percent mark, but the authors question whether this change by itself will make American medicine more caring and more patient centered. The future direction of the profession will depend on whether women doctors will lead the effort to chart a new course for health care delivery in the United States.

Women and Health Research
Women and Health Research

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 1994-02-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 030904992X

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In the nineteenth century some scientists argued that women should not be educated because thinking would use energy needed by the uterus for reproduction. The proof? Educated women had a lower birth rate. Today's researchers can only shake their heads at such reasoning. Yet professional journals and the popular press are increasingly criticizing medical research for ignoring women's health issues. Women and Health Research examines the facts behind the public's perceptions about women participating as subjects in medical research. With the goal of increasing researchers' awareness of this important topic, the book explores issues related to maintaining justice (in its ethical sense) in clinical studies. Leading experts present general principles for the ethical conduct of research on womenâ€"principles that are especially important in the light of recent changes in federal policy on the inclusion of women in clinical research. Women and Health Research documents the historical shift from a paternalistic approach by researchers toward women and a disproportionate reliance on certain groups for research to one that emphasizes proper access for women as subjects in clinical studies in order to ensure that women receive the benefits of research. The book addresses present-day challenges to equity in four areas: Scientificâ€"Do practical aspects of scientific research work at cross-purposes to gender equity? Focusing on drug trials, the authors identify rationales for excluding people from research based on demographics. Social and Ethicalâ€"The authors offer compelling discussions on subjectivity in science, the evidence for male bias, and issues related to race and ethnicity, as well as the recruitment, retention, and protection of research participants. Legalâ€"Women and Health Research reviews federal research policies that affect the inclusion of women and evaluates the basis for researchers' fears about liability, citing court cases. Riskâ€"The authors focus on risks to reproduction and offspring in clinical drug trials, exploring how risks can be identified for study participants, who should make the assessment of risk and benefit for participation in a clinical study, and how legal implications could be addressed. This landmark study will be of immediate use to the research community, policymakers, women's health advocates, attorneys, and individuals.

Unwell Women
Unwell Women

Author: Elinor Cleghorn

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0593182960

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A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health—from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases—brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative. Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy—and the men who controlled their fate—this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women—and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.

Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine
Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine

Author: Ellen S. More

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13:

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"This volume examines the wide-ranging careers and diverse lives of American women physicians, shedding light on their struggles for equality, professional accomplishment, and personal happiness over the past 150 years."--BOOK JACKET.

Sympathy and Science
Sympathy and Science

Author: Regina Morantz-Sanchez

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-10-12

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0807876089

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When first published in 1985, Sympathy and Science was hailed as a groundbreaking study of women in medicine. It remains the most comprehensive history of American women physicians available. Tracing the participation of women in the medical profession from the colonial period to the present, Regina Morantz-Sanchez examines women's roles as nurses, midwives, and practitioners of folk medicine in early America; recounts their successful struggles in the nineteenth century to enter medical schools and found their own institutions and organizations; and follows female physicians into the twentieth century, exploring their efforts to sustain significant and rewarding professional lives without sacrificing the other privileges and opportunities of womanhood. In a new preface, the author surveys recent scholarship and comments on the changing world of women in medicine over the past two decades. Despite extraordinary advances, she concludes, women physicians continue to grapple with many of the issues that troubled their predecessors.

Medical Bondage
Medical Bondage

Author: Deirdre Cooper Owens

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0820351342

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The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research
A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research

Author: Dale DeBakcsy

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1399069004

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In the nineteenth century, a small but dedicated group of European and American women rose to agitate for the inclusion of women in the medical profession. It is a historic tale that we have told and retold for decades, but it is far from where the story of women as physicians and healers begins. Stretching back into deepest antiquity, we possess accounts of women who were consulted by emperors and paupers alike for their medical expertise. They were surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, university lecturers, and medical researchers in correspondence with the most learned societies of their time. And then it all came crashing down. A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research is the story of the women who participated in that early Golden Age, and of a medical establishment closing ranks against them so effectively that, by the early Victorian era, they not only were barred from practicing medicine, but from so much as stepping into a classroom where medical topics were being discussed. It is the story of that intrepid band of reformers and pioneers who built back the women's medical profession from the ashes and constructed a thriving new community of researchers and practitioners who within a century had retaken not only the ground that had been lost, but boldly advanced to levels of fame and achievement unimaginable to any previous era. Told through in-depth accounts of the lives of the pioneers and practitioners who built and rebuilt the women's medical movement, this title dives into the lives of not only legendary figures like Florence Nightingale, Gertrude Elion, Rosalyn Yalow, and Elizabeth Blackwell, but visits women the world over whose medical contributions broke down doors and advanced the cause of women's and world health, like the revolutionary medieval physician Trota of Salerno, the pioneering eighteenth century midwife and businesswoman Madame du Coudray, the microbiological research trailblazer Mary Putnam Jacobi, and the HIV researcher and world epidemic response coordinator Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. With over 140 stories spanning three millennia of global medicine, this book shines a light on the unknown heroes, towering discoveries, tragic missteps, and profound struggles that have accompanied the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the women's medical profession.

Medicine Women
Medicine Women

Author: Cathy Luchetti

Publisher: Crown

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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The story of American women in medicine is multi-fold, from their ascendency as healers and midwives in colonial years to their gradual decline as they were eclipsed by men, whose entrance into the medical ranks brought new standards of exclusionary professionalism. All-male medical schools and boards pushed "healing" women into the subcategory of midwife or nurse. Nineteenth-century women formed their own colleges and eventually forced themselves into competition with accepted medical institutions. But they had to overcome society's Victorian grudge against any woman who wished to become a professional, as well as the basic distrust of a rural population for medicine. Understanding the stories of these medical pioneers--their motivations, hardships, and conflicts--assigns a human face to otherwise dry statistics.--From publisher description.