Judith Bellafaire and Mercedes Herrera Graf . Women Doctors in War . (Williams‐Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series, number 128.) College Station : Texas A&M University Press . 2009 . Pp. xii, 255. $35.00.

Abstract

This book traces the history of female physicians who served with or in the military, from the Civil War through the present-day wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Battling both a male-dominated military and a male-dominated medical hierarchy, these women struggled to attain the right to serve in the armed forces and then to define their roles, both as members of the military and as physicians. Neither of these goals proved easy, as Judith Bellafaire and Mercedes Herrera Graf point out. For most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women faced a military that resisted admitting them as permanent members and a medical field that ascribed masculine qualities to the role of physician. The text begins with the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, during which women who sought to work as military physicians found no clear way to do so. Several women managed to join the war effort, usually working as nurses or occasionally as contract surgeons who held no authority in the military hospitals in which they labored. During World War I, when the Army Medical Department requested the services of all physicians in the country, the women who responded learned that they were not eligible for commissions because of their sex. Again, women found work in military hospitals only as contract surgeons when sufficient numbers of male physicians could not be found. The pressing needs for health care personnel during World War II finally pushed the U.S. military to offer women temporary commissions, but like most other women in the armed forces, they found themselves discharged at war's end. Women gained the right to hold permanent, career commissions as military physicians in 1952, and thereafter their number steadily increased. In particular, the creation of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973 increased the educational benefits available to women and made the military a more appealing career choice for many of them. Still, as the authors describe, female physicians continued to face hurdles to both their military and medical careers that male physicians did not.