While most laymen could recognize Florence Nightingale as the founder of modern nursing, it's doubtful they could likewise identify Louise Pearce as one of the primary researchers in the cure for African Sleeping Sickness or Anna W. Williams as the discoverer of the diphtheria antitoxin. This book profiles 25 women who have made significant contributions to medical research, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lydia Folger Fowler, Virginia Apgar, and Rosalind Franklin, among others. Each profile includes a general introduction and covers the woman's childhood or family background, her formal education, her most valuable contributions to the field, and the important events or persons which influenced her life and career.

This book, the first to describe women medical practitioners other than midwives in the colonial period, emphasizes that medical care was part of every woman's work. The Healer's Calling uses memorable anecdotes, engaging characters, and medical oddities to tell the fascinating story of the practice of household medicine in early America. Rebecca J. Tannenbaum points out that housewives provided much of the medical care available in the seventeenth century. Elite women cared for the indigent in their towns and used medical practice to make influential connections with powerful men; "doctresses" or "doctor women" supported themselves with their practices and competed directly with male physicians; and midwives were crucial "expert witnesses" in cases of fornication, murder, and witchcraft. Yet there were limits to the authority of women's healing communities, with consequences for those who overstepped the bounds. By setting women's practice in the context of contemporary medicine, gender roles, and community norms, Tannenbaum also reveals the relationship between women's medical practice and witchcraft accusations.

Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution makes available a great range of Florence Nightingale's work on women: her pioneering study of maternal mortality in childbirth (Introductory Notes on Lying-in Institutions), her opposition to the regulation of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts (attempts to stop the legislation and otherwise to facilitate the voluntary treatment of syphilitic prostitutes), her views on gender roles, marriage and measures for income security for women and excerpts from her draft (abandoned) novel. There is correspondence with women friends and colleagues from childhood to old age, on a vast range of subjects. Correspondents include old family friends, royal and notable personages, nuns and colleagues in various causes. Most of this material has not been published before and some letters wil be new even to Nightingale scholars. Altogether a very different view of Nightingale emerges from what normally appears in biographies and other secondary sources. This material will enable a new assessment of her feminism, her relations with women and her contribution to improving the status of women of her time.

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821 - 1910) was the first woman awarded the MD degree in the United States. This is the story of her dedicated, groundbreaking struggle to practice the medical profession, eloquently told in her own words. Full of insightful reflections on the philosophy of medicine, women's education, the evils of slavery, and the nature of American society in the nineteenth century, this unique autobiography will interest scholars and students of women's studies and the history of science.

Rebecca was the first African-American women to become a doctor of medicine in the United States. She published A Book of Medical Discourses in 1883, which discussed the prevention and cure of infant bowel issues.

Rediscovers women doctors who helped create styles of medical writing still used today 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 Jacobl, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books.

A biography of the first American Indian woman doctor focuses on her role as a mediator between cultures.