Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors

By Cathy Luchetti

Cathy Luchetti, author of Women of the West, presents a photographic and documentary history of the women who brought the healing arts to the American West despite formidable obstacles, both social and natural. Photos.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517598485
• ISBN13: 9780517598481
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Women healers of the West. You go, girl!

What a wonderful book, a superb tribute to women as healers, esp those of the American West. I'm a midwife, author of BABY CATCHER: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife, and had the privilege of writing an endorsement of Luchetti's next book, Children of the West - but I wish I'd had an opportunity to blurb this one, as the content is so close to my heart. Medicine Women is a compilation of first-person accounts of women healers, midwives, dentists, abortionists, often just good women helping others during the brief era of the settling of the West. This is a book to read carefully from beginning to end, but it's also a book to pick up and browse through at random. Full of successes and failures, hopes and fears, evidence of knowledge and ignorance, it is a book written with passion that shows on each page.

It Ain't "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman"

Hollywood actually had a good idea, but couldn't help dumbing it down to the point the show was more of a pulp romance than based on fact.This book is the real thing: women struggling with families, school, and society to become physicians. Of course, there was lots of male opposition, but there were those men who helped, too. One respected medical professor told his all-male class that they had a "sister" in the class and he expected his students to treat her as one, and they did. Of course, she still had to work twice as hard as the men and be twice as good, but it's a lot easier if you don't have a classful of people trying to trip you up at every opportunity. Also, Brigham Young, of the Mormon Church encouraged women to become physicians; at times the church would even subsidize the tuition for medical school.Even after their degree, women still had to convince people that despite the fact they were women, they truly were good physicians, which meant doing things that male physicians might find "beneath" them: performing emergency surgery on a horse, anesthesizing a $1,500 prized sow, taking care of basic comforts and needs of their patients (hauling water, bringing blankets, writing letters for the illiterate). And as for the photographs, I'll bet you never saw so many confident, professional-looking 19th - turn of the century women in your life!