March is Women’s History Month and I want to give a special shout-out to women working in medicine (including my mother who’s a retired physician!). Check out these books about women in medicine. Book summaries are from our library’s catalog.
The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir by Michele Harper (2020). Also available on e-book via Overdrive/Libby.
Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery.
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura (2021). Also available as an e-book via Overdrive/Libby.
A biography of two pioneering sisters who, together, became America’s first female doctors and transformed New York’s medical establishment by creating a hospital by and for women.
The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati (2015). Also available as an e-book and downloadable audiobook on Overdrive/Libby.
The year is 1883, and in New York City, it’s a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. With the gravity-defying Brooklyn Bridge nearly complete and New York in the grips of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, Anna Savard and her cousin Sophie–both graduates of the Woman’s Medical School–treat the city’s most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they’ve strived for in jeopardy.
The Heart Specialist by Claire Rothman (2011). Also available as an e-book on Overdrive/Libby.
Agnes White is fascinated by the wrong things – microscopes, dissections, anatomy. A lonely orphan raised by her prim grandmother at the turn of the 20th century, Agnes is haunted by vague memories of her father, a renowned Montreal physician who disappeared after being accused of her sister’s murder. Agnes is determined to follow in his footsteps as a doctor, even though medical schools are closed to women. Against the odds, she becomes a world-renowned specialist of the human heart. But the void caused by her father’s disappearance means that she needs to fix her own.
No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain’s Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During WWI by Wendy Moore (2020). Also available as an e-book on Overdrive/Libby.
The inspiring story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who ran the only military hospital staffed entirely by women during World War I-and who transformed medicine in the process. A month after war broke out in 1914, doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson set out for Paris, where they opened a hospital in a luxury hotel and treated hundreds of casualties plucked from France’s battlefields. Although, prior to the war, female doctors were restricted to treating women and children, Flora and Louisa’s work was so successful that the British Army asked them to set up a hospital in the heart of London. Nicknamed the Suffragettes’ Hospital, Endell Street soon became known for its lifesaving treatments and lively atmosphere. In No Man’s Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.
Tooth and Nail: The Making of a Female Fight Doctor by Linda Dahl (2018).
In this entertaining memoir, Dahl details her road to becoming one of the only female fight doctors. Raised in the Midwest by Syrian immigrant parents, Dahl was a surgical resident living in the Bronx when she became enthralled with boxing while watching a fight between Shane Mosley and Oscar de la Hoya in 2000. She eventually landed an uninspiring job as a hospital ear, nose, throat physician; but her boxing passion led her to work secretly as a fight doctor at professional fights.
Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine by Olivia Campbell (2021). Also available on CD audiobook and on e-book via Overdrive/Libby.
Documents the true stories of three pioneering women who defied Victorian-era boundaries to become the first women doctors, discussing how they banded together to support each other and advocate for women’s health in a male-dominated field.
