Women in White Coats: Pioneering Doctors

I like history, especially stories of strong women who made a difference. I really tried to like this book, but the style it was written in dragged a bit. I didn’t have a hard time putting it down.

This book is an excellent, information dense book. It has so much fascinating information about women’s history as re the women’s suffrage movement and medicine as an institution. It illustrates the very real fight for women to gain better educations that would both enable them to earn good wages. Women doctors would make moves that served to improve the lives of women in every social class. It also compares how women doctors were viewed and treated in America versus the UK which was quite different. The author pointed out many key figures in the history of establishing avenues for women to obtain MD’s, gain experience and earn money as doctors. Many of them were quakers even though I also noted that none of the early female doctors mentioned were of this group. Women found it much easier to become doctors in the US, but were omitted from gentile society, whereas women doctors in the UK were welcomed in intellectual circles and high society. The early MD students received such abuses from the medical establishment in the UK that they gained a lot of sympathy from the general public. Politicians from the House of Commons supported their cause due to its popularity and it helped greatly that many of the poorest people benefited from the free and low cost clinics set up by these women as they were getting their feet into the profession. I believe that this would be an excellent source of info for anyone wishing to shine a new light on female trail blazers and how they effected change. Florence Nightingale deserves all support she received by the public for her contributions to healthcare but, at the same point in history other women were forcing the doors of the medical establishment open and arguably making far more wide reaching impacts on the health of women and their potential to earn money and free themselves from the patriarchy. Women who were less praised in their lifetime and more easily forgotten with the passage of time

WOMEN IN WHITE COATS: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine by Olivia Campbell is a historical biography which follows the lives of three Victorian women who fight to earn MDs from universities in the early 1800’s.

This book follows Elizabeth Blackwell MD, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson MD, and Sophia Jex-Blake MD as they fought for first their medical educations and degrees against male prejudice and then strived to improve the health of women and children. Their determination opened doors and led the way for more women to follow.

I liked this book, but I was hoping for more. The determination of any trailblazer must be applauded, and these women’s accomplishments are astonishing as each did it in her own way in a repressive time period. The medical descriptions of practices and procedures in the Victorian era covered in this book are fascinating and it is a wonder anyone lived with some of the treatments given, but there is so much detail that the narrative gets bogged down in places. Also, as the story continues, there are friends and acquaintances added which leads to my having difficulty keeping track of who was doing what and where they were located without sometimes flipping back in the story.

This was an interesting biography of these determined women.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 Stars (Rounded up)

Male ER nurse here, and I also love teaching about the history of medicine. Men have done great things but I’ve worked with many fantastic women over the years and am not ashamed to say I’ve learned a lot from them. Reading about their struggle to get into the profession when it made no sense to keep them out is truly a satisfying story of perseverance and the moving forward of the greatest benefit to mankind: medicine

This book describes the barriers that women had to overcome, to be recognized as legitimate and competent physicians in a field that was dominated by men. It tells of the triumphs and the disappointments that women endured in their fight to be recognized as equals to men. In the end, they managed to prove that in some instances, they were better than men.