Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine (review)

In many ways this stellar edited collection represents the coming of age of this field of study. The twelve articles offer new insights, interpretations, and perspectives on women physicians and expand on and reiterate earlier scholarship. The themes addressed include identity formation, gender performativity, health status, women physicians' relationships to their bodies and to those of their patients, concerns about sexuality and sexual orientation, childbirth, and menopause. This careful rendering highlights the coexistence of these physicians' privilege and oppression and race and class hierarchies. Among the treasures in this book is the introduction; it is the finest historiography to date on the scholarship. It alone is must-reading for scholars in the history of medicine, women's studies, and numerous related fields. The editors acknowledge the Western, collegiate emphasis of the essays—a refreshing starting point.

There are three distinct sections of the book. The essays in the first, "Performing Gender, Being a Woman Physician," examine the lives of Mary Putnam Jacobi, Mary Dixon James, Margaret Jessie "Mom" Chung, and Mary Steichen Calderone as each negotiated their gendered cultural contexts, challenged or embraced ideals of femininity, and (in some cases) offered public discussions of sexuality. These essays also address how the physicians' personal lives informed their work: Chung's (at least) homosensual relationships with female medical personnel and cross-dressing elicit wrath in an era hostile to masculinist women; Dixon James's surgical expertise and uncompromising public persona resulted in the lengthiest libel suit in American history; and Calderone's "use" of her own childhood sexual trauma for political and social ends earned her notoriety, particularly as she advocated masturbation. All three were vilified, and that two were surgeons—the most male-dominated of all specialties—accounted in part for the policing of their personal lives and cruel scrutiny of their work. The recognition that they "performed" gender, informed by queer theory, is a new and needed lens. Each chose public and private personas that emboldened them.

The second section, "Challenging the Culture of Professionalism," emphasizes the struggles encountered by physicians as they acquiesced to or combated traditional models of professionalism in health care. Here, cultures of gender-inflicted shame, humiliation, and even violence are examined, as are relations between physicians and lay movement activists, rhetorical strategies used by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, and the torment levied on female medical students in the 1970s. This is a provocative mix of essays, yet the degrees to which some challenged medical professionalism, withstood/survived it, or benefited from it (via social class and racial/ethnic privilege) are distinctions that could be more fully drawn.

The "Expanding the Boundaries" section examines "sectarian" women physicians in nineteenth-century Chicago (homeopaths only), as well as Victorian maternalism exported as medical missionary work, and offers a comparative analysis of two physicians, one black, one white, who directed campus-based health services and the racialized politics and discrimination that informed their own goals and campus programming. Of the three, this is the section that leaves this reader wanting more. It contains the only essay on alternative systems. Additional scholarship would enhance the reader's knowledge of the scathing cultural critiques, sometimes gendered, that these systems exacted. Fuller exploration would also yield insights into the orthodox emphasis on "medicine" versus the sectarian emphasis on "healing." Yes, the focus is on collegiate physicians, but "sectarians" also graduate from their system's colleges. In an era in which medical authority was disputed, the credentials of all were in many ways coequal. Similarly, the essay that discusses Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, the black physician on campus, is the only essay that examines the African American experience. Critiques and resistance levied by activists of color are mentioned briefly elsewhere, but only one full study is offered.

The...