Tag Archives: female physician

Dorothy Russell: The complete pathologist

January 19, 2023

Dorothy Stuart Russell. Photo via Todiramphus on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 […]

Healer of the pharaohs: History’s first woman doctor

December 13, 2022

Matthew Turner Washington, US   Fragment of a queen’s face. Yellow jasper statue fragment from the Egyptian New Kingdom, c. 1390–1336 BC. Met Museum. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Some 4500 years ago, as the great pyramids rose above the desert sands of Egypt, there lived a remarkable woman. Her name was Peseshet, and she is humanity’s […]

Mary Niles and the Canton rats

June 9, 2020

Edward McSweegan Kinston, Rhode Island, United States   Doctor Mary West Niles, Wikipedia  Bubonic plague arrived in Honolulu in December 1899. A month later it had spread to San Francisco, where the infection caused a series of deadly outbreaks until 1907.1 But for decades before plague reached the American west coast, it had burned through […]