I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction in preparation for writing the next book this fall. The title of this post is one of these books (by Mary Roth Walsh – 1977).  Yes, its an old book, but I was after the historical stuff… She chronicles and examines the history of women becoming physicians from 1835-1975.

Originally, the argument against women in medicine was based on our menstrual cycles. It was first argued that we would be unable to function during the menstrual flow or that the hormonal fluctuations would damage the quality of our work. Later a man named Clark would argue in 1873 that, “The most dangerous threat… stemmed from the mistake of educating females as if they were males. Since the uterus was connected to the central nervous system, energy expended in one area was necessarily removed from another.”

Despite this bias, women continued to train as physicians.

In 1870, there were 544 female physicians.

1880: 2,432

1890: 4,557

1900: 7,387

1910: 9,015 (6% of all physicians)

As it turns out, the number of female physicians peaked in 1910 only to drop precipitously shortly thereafter. Why? In 1893, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine admitted the first ever co-educational class of medical students. Women declared the ‘battle’ for equal education won, and woman’s medical colleges began to close with the expectation that medical schools would be open on an equal basis to both sexes.  For a time, they were.

Then slowly, as women’s liberation movements focused on winning the vote, those numbers eroded. The men in control of the schools began to accept only a handful of women into their class, the bare number necessary to claim co-education. Then, women were denied access to nearly all internships and residencies after graduation, particularly the ones at prestigious institutions. Those women who continued in the face of blatant discrimination earned far less than their male colleagues and were denied positions of influence and power within the medical community (based on their ‘lesser’ internship/residency).

And so the enrollment of women in medical schools dropped precipitously.

Although women continued to apply to medical school in the face of nearly certain rejection, the number of women physicians wouldn’t begin to recover until during the second world war when medical schools recruited women out of sheer necessity. Not until the 1970s would women finally begin to be admitted on equal footing with men on the basis of academic merit alone.

Today, most medical schools admit an equal number of women and men.

Tags: female physicians, medical school, women physicians