Medicine

Abstract

The struggle for women to be enabled to become doctors was the earliest and most hard fought of their campaigns to enter the professions. The women claimed that what they were seeking was re-entry to the medical profession. The researches of Sophia Jex-Blake and others caused them to point out that from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century women had been the primary healers in the community and had even been professors of medicine in the universities of Italy and Spain. However, the function had been gradually removed from the household duties of the wife and mother with the development of the profession outside the home and women had been excluded. By the nineteenth century they had been relegated to a subordinate role as untrained nurses and were even largely superseded as midwives.

It is one of the lessons of the history of progress that when the time for a reform has come you cannot resist it.… Opponents, when the time has come, are not merely dragged at the chariot wheels of progress — they help to turn them.

James Stansfeld, article on ‘Medical Women’ in Nineteenth Century (July 1877)