When first published in 1985,
Sympathy and Science was
hailed as a groundbreaking study of women in medicine. It remains
the most comprehensive history of American women physicians
available. Tracing the participation of women in the medical
profession from the colonial period to the present, Regina
Morantz-Sanchez examines women's roles as nurses, midwives, and
practitioners of folk medicine in early America; recounts their
successful struggles in the nineteenth century to enter medical
schools and found their own institutions and organizations; and
follows female physicians into the twentieth century, exploring
their efforts to sustain significant and rewarding professional
lives without sacrificing the other privileges and opportunities of
womanhood.
In a new preface, the author surveys recent scholarship and
comments on the changing world of women in medicine over the past
two decades. Despite extraordinary advances, she concludes, women
physicians continue to grapple with many of the issues that
troubled their predecessors.