Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975

by Mary Roth Walsh

...Highly praised in The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Historical Review.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medicine

326 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1977

Reviews

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really would have appreciated more than just a view of female doctors in the Boston area for much of the book. Also, you can tell it's from the 70s sometimes. I disliked incredibly broad claims about who was the first female doctor when it was so focused geographically. Very USA focused with little mention of the rest of the world, certainly almost no mention of countries outside of North America and Europe.

An interesting read, but not what the title lead me to think it was. Could have been substantially better or at least preluded with the fact that it is certainly not comprehensive. I have a lot of issues with how this was presented, especially ignoring what is likely a myriad of female doctors across the world and from different cultures.

[Valerie]

This mostly focuses on the US. There have been university trained women doctors for as long as there have been university trained doctors--for example, the University of Bologna was open to both sexes. Before this, training as a healer was largely a matter of apprenticeship. People like Galen and Hippocrates tried to codify medical knowledge, but their works didn't get wide circulation in most places.

Women doctors in the US did suffer significant discrimination, and ironically, the discrimination got greater pretty much worldwide following the Renaissance--but an important part of the discrimination came with discrediting folk healers, and barring women from advanced academic degrees in general.

This source is now dated, of course, and one hopes that things have significantly improved since: but it's a necessary part of historical knowledge to understand how crippling the barriers were in the Victorian era and after.

[April Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is from the seventies, a time when women were finally just beginning to go into medicine again after all but dispersing from the field for several decades, and looks at how first generation feminism led to a short-lived spike in women in medicine in the Victorian era. It's the best resource I've found so far for learning about pioneering 1830s doctor Harriot Hunt.