The Doctor Was a Woman
Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier
-
- 23,99 €
-
- 23,99 €
Descrição da editora
"No women need apply." Western towns looking for a local doctor during the frontier era often concluded their advertisements in just that manner. Yet apply they did. And in small towns all over the West, highly trained women from medical colleges in the East took on the post of local doctor to great acclaim. In this new book, author Chris Enss offers a glimpse into the fascinating lives of ten amazing women, including the first female surgeon of Texas, the first female doctor to be convicted of manslaughter in an abortion-related maternal death, and the first woman physician to serve on a State Board of Health.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Enss (The Widowed Ones) profiles in this colorful account 10 of the first female physicians on America's Western frontier. She portrays them as highly determined individuals, whose resolve not only saw them through the medical schools that resisted admitting them, but also through the treatment of recalcitrant patients ("Doctors were few and far between in the unsettled land," she writes, and yet "for a time it seemed most trappers, miners, and merchants would rather suffer than consult a woman doctor"). Among the "lady physicians" and "hen medics," there was Lilian Heath, a pioneer of plastic surgery who in 1886 mended the face of a man who'd shot himself in despair (she told him he looked better after her 30 surgeries than before); Emma French, the 16th wife of a Mormon who received the midwifery training common among her sister wives; and Bessie Efner, who was seduced to Wyoming by boosters of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, only to find that the men were unwilling to see her—her first patient was a horse she cured of colic. Between the brief biographies are insightful notes on topics such as treating influenza, sterilizing patients, and extracting bullets. Readers who enjoyed Campbell Olivia's Women in White Coats will want to check this out.
