Celebrating America's Women Physicians

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Careers
Lessons
Higher Education
Suggested Reading
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Project Resources

Additional Resources on Women, Health, Midwifery, and Medicine

Primary:

  • Alcott, Louisa May. Hospital Sketches. Edited by Alice Fahs. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.
  • Reynolds, Richard and John Stone, eds. On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, and Essays. 3rd edition. Boston and New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.
  • Stringer, Helen Dann. Millie, M.D. The Story of a Nineteenth Century Woman, 1846-1927. Utica, New York: North Country Books, 1992.

Secondary:

  • Abram, Ruth J. ed. "Send Us a Lady Physician": Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.
  • Byrd, W. Michael and Linda A Clayton. "An American Health Dilemma: A History of Blacks in the Health System." Journal of the National Medical Association 84 (1992): 189-200.
  • Carnegie, Mary Elizabeth. The Path We Tread: Blacks in Nursing, 1854-1984. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1986.
  • Leavitt, Judith Walzer, ed. Women and Health in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
  • ___ and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1985.
  • LeClair, Mary, Justin D. White, and Susan Keeter. Three Nineteenth-Century Women Doctors: Elizabeth Blackwell, Mary Walker, and Sarah Loguen Fraser. Syracuse: Hofmann Press, 2007.
  • Lee, Valerie. Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1996.
  • McGregor, Deborah Kuhn. From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
  • Moldow, Gloria. Women Doctors in Gilded-Age Washington: Race, Gender, and Professionalization. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
  • More, Ellen S. Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850-1995. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • Rosenberg, Charles and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. The Male Mid-Wife and the Female Doctor: The Gynecology Controversy in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. New York: Arno Press, 1974.
  • Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
  • Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1982.
  • Wells, Susan. Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Resources on Teaching with Archival Materials and on Teaching Literature and Medicine

  • Sample student projects: Biographies of women doctors researched and written as a class and published online
    • "160 Years of Public Ambiguity: Inquiring into the Reception History of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Social and Medical Pioneer," a class-authored cultural history of the changing representations of Elizabeth Blackwell and her achievement as the first woman to earn a medical degree over the decades since she graduated: http://www.hws.edu/about/blackwell_history.aspx For more about this project as well as general guidelines for teaching using archival sources, see Berry, Sarah. "Students in the Archives: A Short Report on a Significant Learning Experience." Currents in Teaching and Learning 3 (2011): 33-41. Open access URL: http://www.worcester.edu/Currents/Archives/Volume_3_Number_2/CURRENTSV3N2BerryP33.pdf
    • "Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser," a class-authored biography of the first African American women to earn a medical degree, with attention to the racial and gender inequalities she faced and overcame, in the Changing the Face of Medicine exhibition under "She Inspires Me": http://wwwcf.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/viewforum.cgi?topic=3
  • Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, eds. Teaching Literature and Medicine. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2000.