Women in Medicine

Women in Medicine
Author: Ted Grant
Publisher: Firefly Books
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2004
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1552979067

A photographic tribute to women doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. Women in Medicine celebrates the women who spend their lives providing treatment, giving comfort and easing the pain of patients in hospitals and clinics across North America. The book's introduction traces the tumultuous progress of women healers from ancient Egypt until the present. Centuries before medical schools formally trained women, they learned through trial and error by caring for family members. The acceptance of women's ability to heal changed with the times -- one era's angel of mercy was another era's witch. Today, women comprise over 80 percent of all medical workers and are increasing their numbers as doctors, surgeons, researchers and professors. The striking black and white photographs capture the daily working lives of women in medicine in a variety of roles including: Midwives Nurses Technicians Therapists Physicians' Assistants Researchers. Sprinkled throughout these candid, unposed images are memorable quotes from both historic and contemporary sources.

This Side of Doctoring

This Side of Doctoring
Author: Eliza Lo Chin
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2002
Genre: Medical
ISBN:

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

A History of Women in Medicine

A History of Women in Medicine
Author: Sinéad Spearing
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2019-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526714310

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.

Unwell Women

Unwell Women
Author: Elinor Cleghorn
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593182960

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.

Closing the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine

Closing the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine
Author: Amy S. Gottlieb, MD, FACP
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2020-10-28
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 303051031X

Women now represent over half of medical school matriculants, almost half of residents and fellows, and over a third of practicing physicians nationally. Despite considerable representation among the physician workforce, women are paid 75 cents on the dollar compared with their male counterparts after accounting for specialty, geography, time in practice, and average hours per week worked. This pay gap is significantly greater than the one reported for US women workers as a whole and has shown little improvement over time. While much has been written about the problem, a robust discussion about how to rectify the situation has been missing from the conversation. Closing the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine is the first comprehensive assessment of how cultural expectations and compensation methodologies in medicine work together to perpetuate salary disparities between men and women physicians. Since the gender gap reflects a convergence of forces within our healthcare enterprises, achieving pay equity can be an overwhelming undertaking for institutions and their leaders. However, compensation is foremost a business endeavor. Therefore, a roadmap for operationalizing equity within the finance, human resources, and compliance structures of our organizations is critical to eliminating disparities. The roadmap described in this book breaks down the component parts of compensation methodology to reveal their unintentional impact on salary equity and lays out processes and procedures that support new approaches to generate fair and equitable outcomes. Additionally, the roadmap is anchored in change management principles that address institutional culture and provide momentum toward salary equity. The book begins with a review of the evidence on the gender pay gap in medicine. The following chapter discusses how gender-based differences in performance assessments, specialty choice, domestic responsibilities, negotiation, professional resources, sponsorship, and clinical productivity accumulate across women’s careers in medicine and impact evaluation, promotion, and therefore compensation in the healthcare workplace. The next two chapters focus, respectively, on how compensation is determined - highlighting potential pitfalls for pay equity - and regulatory and legal considerations. Chapters 5 and 6 explore organizational infrastructure, salary data collection and analysis, and culture change strategies necessary to rectify compensation inequities. Chapter 7 offers a detailed account of one medical institution’s successful journey to achieve salary equity. The book’s final chapter emphasizes that closing the gender pay gap is at its essence a business endeavor and recommends that organizations assess progress and cost with the same attention, rigor, and regularity as afforded other operating expenses. Closing the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine offers a detailed roadmap for healthcare organizations seeking to close the gender pay gap among their physician workforce. This first-of-its-kind book will assist institutions plan courses of action and identify potential pitfalls so they can be understood and mitigated. It will also prove a valuable resource for transformational leadership and systems-based change critical to attaining compensation equity.

Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine

Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine
Author: Ellen S. More
Publisher:
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN:

"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.

Stress and Women Physicians

Stress and Women Physicians
Author: M.A. Bowman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1468402676

This book is about the well-being of today's female physicians. The woman who chooses medicine as a career has a challenge that is in many ways unique, yet somehow similar to other women who are breaking the barriers in many professions. The increasing number of career women is an outgrowth of the women's and anti-discrimination movements which have not yet freed the majority of women from their previous sociali zation in which women were wives and homemakers. Many men, and of women, are as yet unprepared for the major changes in the roles women which have occurred in the last two decades. Men, whose wives and mothers have held the traditional roles of this century in our industrial society, are the mainstream of medicine. Women physicians, clearly the minority, have been considered unusual anomalies and are thought to lack impact on the whole of medicine. The women who choose medicine do not necessarily see themselves as feminists, or even as beneficients of the women's movement. Their numbers are increasing rapidly, faster than societal norms and ideas can keep up with them. Discrimination has existed, and will continue to exist, at least on an individual basis, but, hopefully, the institutional barriers and myths are being struck down with the increased numbers of women physicians. Women physicians, and the stressors they face, will change as their numbers increase.

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
Author: Janice P. Nimura
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-01-19
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0393635554

New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography "Janice P. Nimura has resurrected Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell in all their feisty, thrilling, trailblazing splendor." —Stacy Schiff Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights—or with each other. From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. As Elizabeth herself predicted, "a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now."

Women and Modern Medicine

Women and Modern Medicine
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9004333398

Modernising scientific medicine emerged in the nineteenth century as an increasingly powerful agent of change in a context of complex social developments. Women's lives and expectations in particular underwent a transformation in the years after 1870 as education, employment opportunities and political involvement extended their personal and gender horizons. For women, medicine came to offer not just treatment in the event of illness but the possibilities of participation in medical practise, of shaping social policies and political understandings, and of altering the biological imperatives of their bodies. The essays in this collection explore various ways in which women responded to these challenges and opportunities and sought to use the power of modernising Western medicine to further their individual and gender interests.

Medical Bondage

Medical Bondage
Author: Deirdre Cooper Owens
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2017-11-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0820351342

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.