Women in Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century

Volume I: Debates

Claire Brock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032207896
• eBook ISBN: 9781040016169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The volume explores the range of reactions to medical women from the mid-nineteenth century up until the start of the Great War in 1914. By covering this period, readers will be introduced to ongoing debates surrounding women in medicine, via sources which explore the possibilities for – as well as the problems of – female professional practice. The perspectives of detractors and supporters, as well as medical women themselves, are taken into account, and especial consideration given to opinions which were not neatly divided along gender lines. Of key concern here is a nuanced tracing through primary material of changes in the perception of medical women, as well as the ways in which lingering prejudices disappeared or remained well into the twentieth century. This volume focuses on two key areas: first, the debates and challenges around medical and surgical education for women; and, second, women's physical and mental 'fitness' to practise. The reproduction of previously unpublished student magazines, both from the foundational London School of Medicine for Women, as well as medical schools which considered admitting women during this period, are an original feature of this volume. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this title will be of great interest to students of Women's History and the History of Medicine.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology: Selected Key Dates
• General Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Letters to Ladies in Favor of Female Physicians For Their Own Sex
• 2 Frontispiece Image of ‘The “Upas” of the Medical Profession’, The Present State of the Medical Profession in Great Britain and Ireland, With Remarks on the Preliminary and Moral Education of Medical and Surgical Students
• 3 ‘Lady Doctors’
• 4 Medical Women
• 5 Unmasked, or the Science of Immorality, To Gentlemen by a Woman Physician and Surgeon
• 6 The Medical Profession: Being the Essay to Which was Awarded the First Carmichael Prize of £200 By the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland
• 7 Men, Women, and Progress
• 8 ‘Physical Society’, Guy’s Hospital Gazette
• 9 ‘How Women Doctors are Made’
• 10 ‘Pioneer Women Doctors: Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Dr Garrett Anderson, Dr Sophia Jex-Blake’
• 11 Sketch of the Foundation and Development of the London School of Medicine for Women
• 12 The Seven Lamps of Medicine: Inaugural Address Delivered at the London School of Medicine for Women, October 1, 1887 and A Woman’s Words to Women on the Care of Their Health in England and in India
• 13 ‘Lady Doctors. Increasing Demand for Their Services. Some Objections. The Question of “Nerves”’, Observer
• 14 ‘Scarcity of Doctors’
• 15 ‘Women Doctors in the War’
• Bibliography
• Index