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6 books match the query 'Women in medicine'

cover of A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy

A Vital Force

Women in American Homeopathy

Kirschmann, Anne Taylor

Rutgers University Press, 2003

Homeopathy, as a medical system, presented a significant institutional and economic challenge to conventional medicine in the nineteenth century. Although contemporary critics portrayed homeopathic physicians as part of a sect whose treatment of disease was beyond the pale of acceptable medical practice, homeopathy was in many ways similar to established medicine. Anne Taylor Kirschmann explores the strategic choices and consequences for women practitioners. Not only were female homeopaths respected within their communities, they also enjoyed considerable professional advantages not available to women within regular medicine.

A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy offers a new interpretation of women’s roles in modern medicine. Kirschmann strengthens and clarifies the history of homeopathic women physicians and creates a framework of comparison to “regular,” or orthodox, physicians. Women medical practitioners chose homeopathy in dramatic numbers from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, although the reasons for this preference varied over time. Linked to social reform movements in the nineteenth century, anti-modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, and countercultural ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, women's advocacy of homeopathy has been intertwined with broad social and cultural issues in American society.

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cover of Changing the Culture of Academic Medicine: Perspectives of Women Faculty

Changing the Culture of Academic Medicine

Perspectives of Women Faculty

Linda H. Pololi

Dartmouth College Press, 2010

Over the past twenty-five years, steadily increasing numbers of women have graduated as physicians, in sufficient numbers to be well represented in senior and leadership positions in the nation’s academic medical centers. Yet women’s expected advancement has stalled. Women rarely hold decision-making positions, and female department chairs or deans continue to be exceedingly rare. Why is this the case? Pololi’s study, based on extensive interviews, illuminates medical school culture and shows a sharp disconnect between the values of individual faculty members and the values of academic institutions of medicine. Pololi looks closely at women medical faculty’s experiences as outsiders in medicine, opening a window into medical culture. She argues that placing more women and people of color in leadership positions would provide transformative and more effective leadership to improve health care and would help address current inequities in the health care provided to different racial and cultural groups.
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cover of My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland

My Life's Travels and Adventures

An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland

Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa

Iter Press, 2020

In her never-finished My Life’s Travels and Adventures, the eighteenth-century Polish doctor Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa plays a myriad of roles, including child bride, wife, mother, lover, adventuress, slave trader, writer, and home-taught physician. She successfully carved out a viable niche for herself, navigating the multicultural, multiethnic, and varied religious environment of Europe’s eastern periphery. Despite limited expectations for female professionals, she became a highly sought after and well-respected practitioner of the medical arts and rose to the position of court physician to Turkish pashas and Hungarian princes, and even to Sultan Mustafa III. My Life’s Travels and Adventures—part memoir, part autobiography, and part travelogue—provides a view into eighteenth-century social, professional, and gender interactions and weaves a rich narrative replete with vignettes of love, travel, and popular superstitions important to our historical, ethnographic, and religious understanding of the era.

This edition brings the entirety of this personal and idiosyncratic memoir to English for the first time.
 
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cover of Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

Out of the Dead House

Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

Susan Wells

University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science.
    Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read.
    Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House  adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.
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cover of Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America

Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America

Carolyn Skinner

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Women physicians in nineteenth-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to nineteenth-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough. Whether women could or should be physicians hinged mostly on maintaining their femininity while displaying the newly established standard traits of successful practitioners of medicine.

Women Physicians and Professional Ethos provides a unique example of how women influenced both popular and medical discourse. This volume is especially notable because it considers the work of African American and American Indian women professionals. Drawing on a range of books, articles, and speeches, Carolyn Skinner analyzes the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century American women physicians. She redefines ethos in a way that reflects the persuasive efforts of women who claimed the authority and expertise of the physician with great difficulty.

Descriptions of ethos have traditionally been based on masculine communication and behavior, leaving women’s rhetorical situations largely unaccounted for. Skinner’s feminist model considers the constraints imposed by material resources and social position, the reciprocity between speaker and audience, the effect of one rhetor’s choices on the options available to others, the connections between ethos and genre, the potential for ethos to be developed and used collectively by similarly situated people, and the role ethos plays in promoting social change. Extending recent theorizations of ethos as a spatial, ecological, and potentially communal concept, Skinneridentifies nineteenth-century women physicians’ rhetorical strategies and outlines a feminist model of ethos that gives readers a more nuanced understanding of how this mode of persuasion operates for all speakers and writers.

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cover of Women and Health in America, 2nd Ed.: Historical Readings

Women and Health in America, 2nd Ed.

Historical Readings

Judith W. Leavitt

University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women's health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health.
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