The Woman in the History of Health

Abstract

The entrance of women in history and in history of science and medicine, both as objects and subjects, has been extremely slow. By the origins of women’s studies in the early twentieth century, the heritage of women in healthcare only began to receive significant historical attention from the 1970s [1], when both the second wave feminist movement and the new study of social history contributed to the development of both women’s history and history of medicine. Prior to this period, medicine and its history were mostly written solely by and about men emphasizing the scientific developments and the men who had made them possible. The ordinary everyday practice of medicine, let alone the kinds of domestic or marginal healing often performed by women, was simply not part of the discipline.

After centuries of dormancy, young women

can now look toward a future moulded by their own hands

Rita Levi Montalcini, Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine