Olivia Campbell

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.… (mehr)