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What role have women had in the improvement of healthcare, and what qualities do they bring to the field?

By Mary Liepold

Photo left: Mercy Chidi has provided care to many HIV/AIDS patients in Africa.

The Issue in Brief

Women have always served as midwives, nursed the sick, and applied traditional remedies. Until modern times, in much of the world, women’s wider work in the health professions was limited by social constraints. Women were nurses; men were doctors. The most scientific and “advanced” cultures were most likely to enforce this division. A nurse could be famous, like Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and the Jamaican Mary Jane Seacole, but she still ranked below the doctor. In some traditional cultures, where science has not separated the physical from the spiritual, women’s nurturing and care-giving receive greater respect, but healing power may still rest largely with men.

Around the world today, women are overcoming great odds to claim equal place in both nurturing and healing, to erase false divisions, to claim responsibility for themselves and each other, and to uplift holistic practices that heal body and mind. Our impulse to tend and befriend is an asset. While the tending directly promotes health, the befriending leads to networks and support groups, to concerted advocacy and action. Though women are still only 27% of US physicians, we are better informed as consumers of healthcare and better organized as health advocates than we were 50 years ago.

Background and Context

Women have made contributions to medicine throughout history. The names of a few women healers have survived from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, from ancient India, and from Italy in the 11th century. For the most part, their stories have been lost. British-born Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman medical school graduate, the first woman doctor in the modern era, and a pioneer in women’s medical education. After 29 medical schools rejected her, the students at Geneva Medical College, Geneva, NY, voted to admit her-reportedly, as a practical joke. She graduated first in her class in January 1849. She founded the Women’s Medical College and the New York Infirmary for Women and Children with her sister Emily and the London School of Medicine for Women with Florence Nightingale. She taught at the London school until three years before her death in 1910.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. Because convention limited the few women doctors of the time to working with women and children, she dressed in a man's suit and top hat to volunteer with the Union Army during the Civil War. She won a commission as an army surgeon in 1862. After the war she became a writer and lecturer. President Andrew Johnson awarded her the Congressional Medal of Honor for her Civil War service in 1865, making her the first woman to hold this honor. In 1917, when the U.S. government revoked 900 such medals and asked for hers, she refused to return it. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter restored her medal posthumously.

Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African American women to earn a medical degree, in 1864. She moved from Boston to Richmond after the Civil War to care for the freed slaves who would otherwise have received no medical care, facing down the intense racism of that time and place. In the record of her life and work, A Book of Medical Discourses, she credits the aunt who raised her with awakening her interest in medicine. In 1889 Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picott became the first Native American woman to graduate from medical school. Her practice served more than 1,300 people and covered 450 square miles.

Women have also made great contributions to medical research. Czech-born Dr.

Gerty Radnitz Cori was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize, for her work on carbohydrate metabolism. Gertrude Elion, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1998, also did significant research.

In succeeding decades, as the number of women in medicine steadily advanced, laywomen made even greater strides in self-knowledge, self-care, and collective advocacy. The publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Collective in 1970 was a milestone of this movement. In the US, the growing interest in yoga and wholesome nutrition is a sign of continuing progress.

Looking forward

Women will push the boundaries of health care and wellness as physicians, researchers, advocates, and consumers. We hope to see continuing integration of western and non-western traditions in health and wholeness and greater recognition of the mind-body connection. Physicians Rachel Naomi Remen and Jean Shinoda Bolen (a member of the Peace X Peace Advisory Board) are both excellent examples.

Sources and Resources

Jean Shinoda Bolen(website)

Rebecca Lee Crumpler

Rachel Naomi Remen(website)

Elizabeth Blackwell.

This Page X Page paper is a product of Peace X Peace. To join women around the world who are networking for peace and development and learn about this and other issues firsthand, go to www.peacexpeace.org.