Category: Women in Medicine
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Women in medicine
Women have long faced discrimination, prejudice, and exclusion from formal medical training, despite having served as healers and midwives since antiquity. In ancient Egypt, Merit Ptah was recognized as the first known woman physician in about 2700 BCE. In Greece, owing to societal restrictions, women like Agnodice practiced medicine clandestinely, eventually leading to legal reforms…
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Metrodora: Egyptian physician, midwife, and surgeon
Geraldine MillerLiverpool, England Metrodora is considered to be the “the mother of gynecology.”1 Yet, for many centuries, she has remained unknown. Even today, there are few within the medical community who know much about her pioneering work as a midwife, gynecologist, and surgeon who performed “procedures ahead of her era.”2 She is believed to have…
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Dr. Mary Edwards Walker: A trailblazer for female surgeons
Shabnam ParsaLeshya BokkaLiam ButchartStony Brook, New York, United States Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919) was the first female surgeon in the United States—a pioneering educator, clinician, and medical innovator.1 Her academic path was paved by her parents’ dedication to education. Vesta and Alva Walker established the first free school in Oswego, New York, where they…
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Kadambini Bose Ganguly—India’s first female physician
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The name Kadambini Ganguly is not as well remembered today as those of other female pioneering physicians around the world. In her time, Ganguly was a remarkable trailblazer and the first Indian female doctor to practice Western medicine in India. She was also one of the first women to be admitted…
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Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012): “Chance favors the prepared mind”
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States On December 10, 1986, Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in neurobiology and for the discovery of “nerve growth factor” (NGF) that has since shed light on tumors, wound healing, and other medical problems. Levi-Montalcini was the first Italian…
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Book review: Meeting the Challenge: Top Women in Science
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Women have long faced difficulties in acceptance to scientific fields. Science today remains male-dominated, but there are more examples of brilliant female scientists who have broken through the so-called glass ceiling. In her preface to Meeting the Challenge, Magdolna Hargittai illustrates this point with the 2020 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners,…
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Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor, DDS
Natalie HorakovaHradec Kralove, Czech Republic “I am a New Yorker by birth, but I love my adopted country—the West. To it belongs the credit of making it possible for women to be recognized in the dental profession on equal terms with men.”—Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor1 Lucy Beaman Hobbs was born on March 14, 1833 in…
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Alexa Canady, MD: The first Black woman neurosurgeon
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”– Albert Einstein Alexa Canady (b. 1950) was the daughter of Clinton Canady, Jr., DDS, and Elizabeth Canady, a civil rights activist and the first African American to serve on the Michigan Board of Education. Alexa’s maternal grandmother taught at Lane College, a…
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Books, bangles, and bravado
Jill KarNew Delhi, India Anandibai Joshee (Anandi) set sail from India at the age of eighteen. Bartering her bangles for books, she traded convention for an education, which was considered shameful in nineteenth-century India.1 In doing so, she was the first Indian woman to become a physician (Fig. 1). Born to a traditional Hindu Brahmin…
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Dorothy Russell: The complete pathologist
Nephrologists are familiar with Dorothy Russell because in 1930, long before renal biopsies, she published a monograph in which she classified cases of glomerulonephritis into mitis, intermedia, and gravis. But in the world at large she is better remembered for her research into cancer and neurologic diseases. Born in Sydney in 1895, Dorothy Stuart Russell…