Women Doctors (Fearless)
Why are women doctors heros? Women doctors are heros because they show that not only men are cappable of being doctors. That women can do what ever a man can do. Women doctors are an insipration to young girls out there. It shows that any women can do what ever they want as long as they set their mind to it and try hard. To make sure that young girls recognize the first women doctors they have artifacts and diaries and personal stories to look at.
This picture is a black female doctor. This picture shows young gurls that they could do anything as long as they try, no matter of your skin color and your ethnic backround. This picture also gives young gurls the insipriation to try even harder in school.
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Thursday, October 30, 2008
PIONEERING DOCTORS: WOMEN OF THE PAST
By NADINE BROZAN
Published: January 20, 1986
The sign above the trellised arch reads, ''Send Us a Lady Physician,'' and beyond it photographs and drawings of 20 women, the members of the class of 1879 at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, hang in a gazebo. Overhead, the recorded voice of Dr. Clara Marshall, their professor, addresses them at commencement. She urges them to ''seek and take advantage of opportunities - despise no opening wedge, however small.''
All this is part of an innovative exhibition on ''Women Doctors in America: 1835-1920'' that opens today at the New York Academy of Medicine, 2 East 103d Street.
At the beginning of the 85 years encompassed by the show, there were no women in medicine. By the turn of the century, there were more than 7,000. Unbidden and unwelcome at first, they battered down the barriers keeping them out of medical schools, hospitals and professional societies. Then, as acceptance seemed complete, they slipped back onto the sidelines for almost half a century.
Although not the only focal point of the show, the class of 1879 runs through it as a theme, exemplifying the success achieved by women of the time. The show includes architectural renderings of the kinds of buildings in which women practiced medicine; pictures, newspaper clippings, implements from their offices and artifacts from their homes, and taped readings from their letters, diaries and other documents.
It follows the class from school days into the members' professional practices and affiliations, their homes and families, their activities in social reform and egalitarian causes. It also has sections on six pioneers, including Mary Putnam Jacobi, who paved women's way into medicine and who faced far more profound forms of discrimination, and on the more than 100 black women in 19th-century medicine.
Ruth J. Abram, former director of the Women's Action Alliance, said that the project began ''when I decided to search for a female professional role model, and I disovered quite by accident that there was a 19th-century woman doctor in my own family, Sarah Alice Cohen May.''
Determined to write a book on her great-grandaunt, to whom she was related through her father, Morris Abram, the former president of Brandeis University, she wrote to her relatives but found that her aunt had left almost no information behind. But she did become deeply interested in the doctor's classmates in the class of 1879 at the Philadephia college and got in touch with their descendants. After extensive research, she realized that she had enough material not only for a book - it is being published this week by W. W. Norton & Company - but also for an exhibition. She also realized she had stumbled on a surprising chapter in women's history.
''I had expected to find misery, loneliness and ostracism at every turn,'' she said. ''Instead I found that they had been enormously successful.''
Although not subject to the scorn and discrimination their predecessors faced, they did not have automatic entry into medicine. Denied places in mainstream organizations, they formed their own medical schools with women as teachers, their own clinics and hospitals, their own medical societies. A Ready Market
They were helped by the values of the time, which gave nurturing high regard, and by the perception of women as better nurturers than men. So they were deemed in some ways to be more competent to heal. There was also a ready market for their services, because many women of that era would suffer any illness rather than consult a man. In addition, medicine was largely practiced from the home, so women were able to be physicians without sacrificing the roles of wife or mother.
They were also social activists, in particular for the causes of temperance, peace and child care. ''They didn't say they were too busy with their careers to be involved,'' Miss Abram said. ''Rather, they saw involvement as their God-given duty and felt they had been put on the earth to improve it.''
At the end of the century, two major medical schools, Johns Hopkins and Cornell, decided to admit women, and soon 17 of the 19 all-woman institutions disappeared.
What had been seen as progress -assimilation into mainstream medicine - turned out to be the end of the women's medical movement for several decades. ''The numbers and percentages of women physicans of the 19th century would not be recouped until the 1950's,'' Miss Abram said. ''They would not be surpassed until the 1970's.''
Historians have many theories on the reasons for the decline, she said, enumerating some of them. Medicine changed from primarily a healing art to a scientific pursuit, and women, not wanting to lose their humanitarian work, went into nursing and social work instead. Fees for medical education soared.
She said she hoped the exhibit ''raises the question of whether we can take for granted the gains we have made today.''
''Our 19th-century forebears believed they would bequeath their gains to their daughters and their granddaughters,'' she said, ''and they were wrong.''
Correction: February 6, 1986, Thursday, Late City Final Edition
A caption on the Style page on Jan. 20, with an article about women who pioneered as physicians, omitted picture credits and misidentified the school attended by Mary Putnam Jacobi. She was graduated from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1864. In 1867 it became the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and is now the Medical College of Pennsylvania. Dr. Jacobi's photo was provided by the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College. The two other photographs came from the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine of the Medical College of Pennsylvania.
This article is about female doctors - This article gives us young girls the inspiration that we could do anything we want in life as long as we set our minds to it and try. We will achive our goals in life no matter what anybody says or does.
