As Patients and Healers: The History of Women and Medicine

Abstract

The history of women and medicine in the United States over two centuries is not easily contained in a brief essay. To cover the years from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, we have selected three case studies from three different points in time that illustrate the broad outlines of the story of women and medicine: Mar tha Ballard, a rural midwife who practiced from 1785 to 1812; Elizabeth Blackwell, who, in 1849, became the first American woman to graduate from a regular medical college; and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, publishers in 1973 of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the popular medical guide for women. These and other stories from the history of women and medicine are often used to explore changing pat terns of health and illness or developments in American health care professions; for teachers of general U.S. survey courses, however, these stories may at first appear far removed from the broad themes of American social and political history usu ally addressed in these courses. Here, we want to connect the history of women and medicine to some of those themes?the growing authority of experts; the chang ing role of the state; the significance of race and class; and, of course, the Ufe ex periences of women and the extension of women's sphere.