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.




Botanical Medicine for Women's Health E-Book


Book Description

Use herbal medicines to treat women at any stage of life! Botanical Medicine for Women's Health, 2nd Edition provides an evidence-based, patient-centered approach to botanical interventions for many different medical conditions. More than 150 natural products are covered, showing their benefits in gynecologic health, fertility and childbearing, and menopausal health. This edition includes new full-color photos of herbal plants along with a discussion of the role of botanicals in healthy aging. Written by Aviva Romm, an experienced herbalist, midwife, and physician, this unique guide is an essential resource for everyday practice of herbal medicine. Winner of the 2010 American Botanical Council's James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature Award! - Current, evidence-based information covers more than 150 botanicals for over 35 different conditions. - Case studies provide realistic scenarios and help you apply the content to the real world. - Treatment and formula boxes summarize the most important information. - Color illustrations and photographs of plants enable you to identify herbs visually as well as by substance make-up. - Logical chapter organization begins with the principles of herbal medicine and then covers women's health conditions organized chronologically by lifecycle, from teen and reproductive years to midlife and mature years. - Appendices include practical, at-a-glance information on common botanical names, chemical constituents of medicinal plants, and a summary table of herbs for women's health. - NEW! Updates reflect the latest research and the most current information. - NEW Full-color design and detailed, professional color photos of plants make this a unique, essential resource. - NEW! Coverage of the role of botanicals in healthy aging for women features phytoestrogens, Ayurvedic/Chinese herbs, and discussions of health promotion.




A History of Women in Medicine


Book Description

A study of the female healers of centuries past, and how they went from respected to reviled. Witch is a powerful word with humble origins. Once used to describe an ancient British tribe known for its unique class of female physicians and priestesses, it grew into something grotesque, diabolical, and dangerous. A History of Women in Medicine reveals the untold story of forgotten female physicians, their lives, practices, and subsequent denomination as witches. Originally held in high esteem in their communities, these women used herbs and ancient psychological processes to relieve the suffering of their patients, often traveling long distances, moving from village to village. Their medical and spiritual knowledge blended the boundaries between physician and priest. These ancient healers were the antithesis of the witch figure of today; instead they were knowledgeable therapists commanding respect, gratitude, and high social status. In this pioneering work, Sinéad Spearing draws on current archeological evidence, literature, folklore, case studies, and original religious documentation to bring to life these forgotten healers. By doing so she also exposes the Church’s efforts to demonize them in the eyes of the world, leading female healers to be labeled witches and persecuted in the ensuing hysteria known today as the European witch craze.




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.




Integrative Women's Health


Book Description

Women have made it clear that they desire a broader, integrative approach to their care. Here, for the first time, Integrative Women's Health weaves together the best of conventional treatments with mind-body interventions, nutritional strategies, herbal therapies, dietary supplements, acupuncture, and manual medicine, providing clinicians with a roadmap for practicing comprehensive integrative care. Presenting the best evidence in a concise, accessible format, and written exclusively by female clinicians, this text addresses many aspects of women's health, including feminine perspectives on aging, spirituality and sexuality, specific recommendations for the treatment of cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV, headaches, multiple sclerosis, depression, anxiety, and cancer, as well as integrative approaches to premenstrual syndrome, pregnancy, menopause, fibroids, and endometriosis. Homeopathic, Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners provide insight into the ways in which these systems manage reproductive conditions. As leading educators in integrative medicine, editors Dr. Maizes and Dr. Low Dog demonstrate how clinicians can implement their recommendations in practice, but they also go beyond practical care to examine how to motivate patients, enhance a health history, and understand the spiritual dimensions of healing.




Unwell Women


Book Description

A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health—from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases—brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative. Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy—and the men who controlled their fate—this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women—and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.




Medicine Woman


Book Description

The first in the late Lynn Andrews’s widely popular and visionary Medicine Woman series, this book will encourage you to find your own sacred feminine power. Join Lynn V. Andrews in her pivotal book Medicine Woman, following her journey as an American Indian art collector turned shaman initiate. While visiting an art gallery in Beverly Hills, Lynn sees an image of a rare American Indian basket, which immediately captivates her and haunts her dreams. Upon calling the gallery the following day, she finds that it has mysteriously disappeared. Through a series of serendipitous events, Lynn eventually finds herself in the wilderness of Manitoba to locate a Cree woman named Agnes Whistling Elk, who is said to know the location of the sacred marriage basket and could help Lynn retrieve it. But once up north, Lynn finds more than she bargained for. The evil shaman Red Dog has stolen the marriage basket from Agnes. Agnes asks fellow wise woman Ruby Plenty Chiefs to help her teach Lynn their sacred ways before she attempts to steal it back. From there, Lynn is instructed to become a huntress, invite her wolf-self forward to better serve her on her mission, and to learn to embrace her own sacred medicine. Will Lynn find the feminine power within herself in time to face and defeat Red Dog once and for all?




Medicine Women


Book Description

Women have always been healers -- from the priestess healers in the temples of Isis, to the hedge-witches and herbalists of medieval times, to the physicians, researchers, and alternative practitioners of today. This glorious book celebrates the history of women healers from earliest times to the present. It includes profiles of women healers from all traditions. Some are well known, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Florence Nightingale, and Mary Baker Eddy. Others deserve to be more widely recognized, such as Trotula of Salerno, who wrote gynecological and obstetrical texts in thirteenth-century Italy, and Mama Lola, a respected mambo or healing priestess in the Haitian Voodoo tradition. Text and pictures detail the many contributions of women to the healing arts, from the founding of nursing orders and the tending of soldiers, to the establishment of public health hospitals, to contemporary applications of the ancient lore of herbal medicine and therapeutic touch.




A Woman's Best Medicine


Book Description

In A Woman’s Best Medicine, two physicians and a research psychologist trained in Maharishi Ayur-Veda medicine apply this ancient wisdom to women’s health concerns. Among other topics they discuss are: the benefits of the menstrual cycle; practical ways to enjoy a comfortable pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause; the important contribution of nurturing relationships to wellness; and an introduction to daily and seasonal eating, sleep, and exercise routines. Through questionnaires that assess personal temperament, body-mind type, emotions, and habits, A Woman’s Best Medicine offers an in-depth, preventive, self-care program that fully develops and uses a woman’s self-knowledge. The result is a joyous return to a natural state of radiant health, happiness, and long life. “God bless this book. Its grounding in a meditative perspective and its appreciation of the feminine lead us to the river to drink of knowledge of the totality of life—the definition of Ayur-Veda.”—Yoga International “This book is a valuable introduction to Ayur-Vedic principles, in clear, down-to-earth language.”—Larry Dossey, M. D., author of Healing Words “This is the best book on women’s health I have ever read. It is the revolutionary health book that every woman deserves to read.”—Claudine Schneider, former U.S. congresswoman and co-chair of Women’s Health Initiative, Rhode Island




Medical Bondage


Book Description

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.