Gender and Medicine: Blurring the Boundaries of Tradition

Abstract

The history of women, medicine, and health has expanded in the last several decades to include a closer examination of patient experience, global dimensions of health care, and intersecting systems of power that shape women's access to modern medicine. Many historians are moving beyond stories of medical practitioners and policies and instead analyzing how female patients have shaped medical practice. Current scholarship is analyzing the impact of female experiential knowledge, patients' efforts to preserve traditions that benefited them, and their willingness to challenge conventional practices that did not. Moreover, as these monographs attest, contemporary examinations of women's health emphasize the significance of the international dimensions of women's health and the role that gender plays in constructions of health. Such histories of health and gender recognize that patients have been subjected to a number of patriarchal social, cultural, legal, and economic forces that shape their health care in a system historically controlled by male practitioners.