4.25 ( )

I wish I had enjoyed this more. I learned a lot about a couple of the earliest women pioneers in the field of medicine. Unfortunately too often I got mixed up (names were too similar) and the telling of the back story was interspersed with events in a way that confused rather than illuminated. I really admire the tenacity with which those early women engaged in the fight to earn a place in medical schools and in medical practice. ( )

I so appreciate these women who did what it took become doctors and healers in spite of so much incredibly vile pushback from male doctors and society. The male doctors were clearly threatened and in the 1870's women were certainly not given much intellectual due. Our world is so different now and we still have our own current versions of pushback career and personal sabotage endemic systems. I so appreciate my female and male, well educated doctors. ( )

This book covers many early women doctors in the United States and Great Britain and their contributions to the fight for women to become doctors. Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Sophia Jex-Blake are the main focus of the story although many other women in medicine are mentioned, particularly when their lives intersected with one of these. Although American progress is mentioned, the main thrust of this book is in England and Scotland, with a brief mention of Ireland toward the end of the book. Higher education institutions and the men who ran them were set against allowing women to enter the profession. When a sympathetic administrator was persuaded to allow admission, it was usually overturned by the students or professors who refused to share facilities with the women or teach them. The author relied on correspondence, published medical histories, biographies--personal and collective, articles, and medical journals for much of the information. Persons interested in the American side of things and Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister should read The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Women Brought Medicine to Women -- and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura. ( )

Journalist Olivia Campbell tells the story of the earliest women who received medical degrees in the United States and the United Kingdom. Campbell follows the paths of three groundbreaking women – Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a physician in the United Kingdom, and Sophia Jex-Blake, whose persistence in demanding women’s access to medical education eventually opened the doors for women medical students in the United Kingdom.

Elizabeth Blackwell was the oldest of the three women, and the early chapters of the book focus on her education and early career in New York. The geographical focus shifts to the United Kingdom when Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake are brought to the fore, and the focus remains on the United Kingdom after Elizabeth Blackwell moves her practice to England to join forces with the women physicians there.

It's surprising (or maybe it’s not) how quickly the door shut behind Elizabeth Blackwell in the US and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in the UK to keep other women out of the medical profession. They seem to have found loopholes that quickly closed to prevent other women from enrolling in medical school. These women viewed coed medical education as vital for the status of women physicians to avoid the charge that women’s medical schools were less rigorous than the schools for men. After years of rejection of women applicants to the established medical schools, Elizabeth Blackwell in the US and Sophia Jex-Blake in the UK eventually started medical schools for women, recruiting well-respected male doctors as lecturers for the school.

Inevitably, this book covers some of the same ground as Janice P. Nimura’s The Doctors Blackwell. Nimura’s book is more narrowly focused on the Blackwell sisters, their family, and their careers, while Campbell covers broader territory regarding women’s medical education in the mid-nineteenth century with an emphasis on the United Kingdom. ( )