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Historical Context

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Women in Medicine
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Abstract

Women have practiced medicine for many centuries. In ancient Egypt there were many women students and women professors in the medical schools and, in about 1500 b.c., both Moses and his wife were students of medicine (Turner 1981). There has also been a long history of discrimination against women in medicine, recorded at least as early as 1421, when a petition was presented to King Henry V to prevent women from practicing medicine (Heins 1979). The first formal degree awarded to a woman is said to have been to Constanza Collenda in 1431 (Nadelson 1983).

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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Bowman, M.A. (2002). Historical Context. In: Women in Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0031-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0031-1_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-95309-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-0031-1

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