Synopses & Reviews
For hundreds of years, hospitals, all-male medical schools and state medical boards pushed women healers into the subcategory of midwife or nurse. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that women led the charge to open the field of medicine to aspiring female doctors. They formed their own colleges, studied independently and eventually forced themselves into competition with accepted medical institutions. As American society pushed westward, many women doctors escaped the prejudices of big-city medical establishments and became frontier doctors, ministering to pioneers and their families. In Medicine Women, the early-American female doctor comes to life through her own writings and stories, plus more than fifty stunning and illuminating photographs of the period. This is a book that offers the key to the heart of these women's struggles, and breathes new life into the age-old but often-ignored story of women doctors on the American frontier.
Synopsis
A photographic and documentary history of early American women doctors, their trials, tribulations, and triumphs.
Medicine Women is a unique photographic history of early American women doctors on the frontier. Covering a range of subjects, from women in medical school, rural remedies, kitchen table surgery, and first love: marriage or medicine, Cathy Luchetti offers an intimate portrait of the women who braved not only the wilds of the frontier, but the prejudice and alienation of those around them to become doctors. Her descriptions are lively and informative, with first hand accounts and journals and black and white photographs of the memorable women from this period.