Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850-1995

Abstract

From about 1850, women physicians won gradual acceptance from male colleagues and the general public, primarily as caregivers to women and children. By 1920, they represented approximately 5 percent of the profession. But within a decade, their niche in American medicine -women's medical schools and medical societies, dispensaries for women and children, women's hospitals, and settlement house clinics - had declined. The steady increase of women entering medical schools also halted, a trend not reversed until the 1960s. Yet, as women's traditional niche in the profession disappeared, a vanguard of women doctors slowly opened new paths to professional advancement and public health advocacy. Drawing on rich archival sources and her own extensive interviews with women physicians, the author shows how the Victorian ideal of balance informed and influenced the practice of healing for women doctors in America over the past 150 years. She argues that the history of women practitioners throughout the 20th century fulfils the expectations constructed within the Victorian culture of professionalism. This book demonstrates that women doctors - collectively and individually -sought to balance the distinctive interests and culture of women against the claims of disinterestedness, scientific objectivity, and specialization of modern medical professionalism. That goal, More writes, reaffirmed by each generation, lies at the heart of her central question: what does it mean to be a woman physician? # Drawing on letters, poems, notebooks, and secret diaries, Lisbet Koemer tells the moving story of one of the most famous naturalists who ever lived, the Swedish-born botanist and systematizer, Carl Linnaeus. The first scholarly biography of this great Enlightenment scientist in almost one hundred years, this book also recounts for the first time Linnaeus' grand and bizarre economic project to "teach" tea, saffron, and rice to grow on the Arctic tundra and to domesticate buffaloes, guinea pigs, and elks as Swedish farm animals. Linnaeus hoped to reproduce the economy of empire and colony within the borders of his family home by growing cash crops in northern Europe. The author shows us the often surprising ways he embarked on this project. Her narrative goes against the grain of Linnaean scholarship old and new by analyzing not how modern Linnaeus was, but how he understood science in his time. At the same time, his attempts to organize a state economy according to principles of science prefigured an idea that has become one of the defining features of modernity. This book should be of interest to historians of the Enlightenment, historians of science and by general readers as well.