The irony of women’s acceptance into the medical world, and the unfortunate decline in their status at the beginning of the twentieth-century, is illustrated in this volume through words and pictures. By focusing on the class of 1879 at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the authors of the various essays depict individual trials, frustrations, and victories of nineteenth-century women physicians; and we come to understand a vital aspect of our history and how it affects us all today.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, women, who had hitherto been barred from medical schools, were gradually granted the freedom to study and practice medicine. Indeed, by 1900, over 7,000 female physicians were practicing in America. Women were sought after to fill the void in women’s health care—a substantial one, thanks to Victorian mores—as well as to imbue the medical profession with dignity which only women, it was believed, could supply. Thus the stereotype of women as gentle, virtuous creatures, natural healers, worked in their favor, opening doors to a major profession.