Essays on Women, Medicine and Health


Book Description

Updating and expanding substantially on her earlier work, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem, this new collection bridges the medical/social divide in an accessible and personable way.




Essays on Women, Medicine & Health


Book Description

In this collection of essays, Ann Oakley, one of the most influential social scientists of the last twenty years, brings together the best of her work on the sociology of women's health. She focuses on four main themes - divisions of labour, motherhood, technology and methodology - and in her own inimitable style, combines serious academic discourse from a feminist sociological perspective with a practical understanding of what it is to be women facing the often impersonal world of twentieth-century medicine. Updating and substantially expanding on her earlier work, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem, this new collection bridges the medical/social divide in an accessible and personable way.




Women in Medicine


Book Description

A photographic tribute to women doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. Women in Medicine celebrates the women who spend their lives providing treatment, giving comfort and easing the pain of patients in hospitals and clinics across North America. The book's introduction traces the tumultuous progress of women healers from ancient Egypt until the present. Centuries before medical schools formally trained women, they learned through trial and error by caring for family members. The acceptance of women's ability to heal changed with the times -- one era's angel of mercy was another era's witch. Today, women comprise over 80 percent of all medical workers and are increasing their numbers as doctors, surgeons, researchers and professors. The striking black and white photographs capture the daily working lives of women in medicine in a variety of roles including: Midwives Nurses Technicians Therapists Physicians' Assistants Researchers. Sprinkled throughout these candid, unposed images are memorable quotes from both historic and contemporary sources.




Narrative Matters


Book Description

This compelling collection provides important insight into the human dimensions of health care and health policy.--Scott A. Strassels "American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy"




Letter to a Young Female Physician


Book Description

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of 2021 A poignant and funny exploration of authenticity in work and life by a woman doctor. In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"—a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a “real” doctor. Accessed by thousands of readers around the world, Koven’s “Letter to a Young Female Physician” has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine. Koven tells candid and illuminating stories about her pregnancy during a grueling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her child and aging parents during which her roles as a doctor, mother, and daughter converged, and sometimes collided; the sexism, pay inequity, and harassment that women in medicine encounter; and the twilight of her career during the COVID-19 pandemic. As she traces the arc of her life, Koven finds inspiration in literature and faces the near-universal challenges of burnout, body image, and balancing work with marriage and parenthood. Shining with warmth, clarity, and wisdom, Letter to a Young Female Physician reveals a woman forging her authentic identity in a modern landscape that is as overwhelming and confusing as it is exhilarating in its possibilities. Koven offers an indelible account, by turns humorous and profound, from a doctor, mother, wife, daughter, teacher, and writer who sheds light on our desire to find meaning, and on a way to be our own imperfect selves in the world.




The Female Body in Medicine and Literature


Book Description

Drawing on a range of texts from the seventeenth century to the present, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature explores accounts of motherhood, fertility, and clinical procedures for what they have to tell us about the development of women's medicine. The essays here offer nuanced historical analyses of subjects that have received little critical attention, including the relationship between gynecology and psychology and the influence of popular art forms on so-called women's science prior to the twenty-first century. Taken together, these essays offer a wealth of insight into the medical treatment of women and will appeal to scholars in gender studies, literature, and the history of medicine.




This Side of Doctoring


Book Description

This anthology of stories, poems, essays and quotations explores the duality of being both a woman and a physician.




Medicine and Social Justice


Book Description

Because medicine can preserve and restore health and function, it has been widely acknowledged as a basic good that a just society should provide its members. Yet there is wide disagreement over the scope of what is to be provided, to whom, how, when and why. In this uniquely comprehensive book some of the best-known philosophers, doctors, lawyers, political scientists, and economists writing on the subject discuss the concerns and deepen our understanding of the theoretical and practical issues that run through the contemporary debate. The first section lays a broad theoretical basis for understanding the concept of justice, particularly as it relates to the distribution of health care. The second section critically examines how medical care is distributed in different countries around the world and the particular advantages and injustices associated with those systems. The third section draws attention to the special needs of different social groups and the specific issues of justice that are raised by the impact of various policies on health care distribution. The concluding section delves intothe dilemmas that confront those designing health care systems--the politics, the priorities, and the place of desires as opposed to needs in a socially just scheme.




Mothers


Book Description

A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.




The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine


Book Description

New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography "Janice P. Nimura has resurrected Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell in all their feisty, thrilling, trailblazing splendor." —Stacy Schiff Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights—or with each other. From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. As Elizabeth herself predicted, "a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now."