A Moralist and Modernizer: Mary Scharlieb and the Creation of Gynecological Knowledge, ca. 1880–1914

The professionalization—and popularization—of gynecological medicine reached a crescendo in the early twentieth century, just as increasing numbers of trained women doctors entered the field. One of the most influential of these was Mary Scharlieb, dubbed by one historian the “most important medical woman of her generation.” As the first female gynecological surgeon at a major London hospital, a member of a Royal Commission on Venereal Disease, and a sought-after authority on sexual and reproductive issues, Scharlieb left a large imprint on the development of women’s medicine in both Britain and India. She also influenced popular audiences through dozens of pamphlets and books written for daughters and their mothers, including the widely circulated Youth and Sex (1913; rep. 1919). Her reputation as a wife, mother, and devout Anglo-Catholic softened her image as a pioneering feminist doctor and positioned her well to be a national voice on sex education. The constitutive links between religious belief and medical work have been well established in analyses of nineteenth-century women nurses and medical missionaries, but less clear is how religion shaped the views of doctors and contributed to the development of women’s medicine. Analysis of the interplay between religious and scientific ideas is particularly relevant for understanding the emergence of public health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a process that historians have typically framed as “an ideological struggle between moralists and modernizers.” The case of Mary Scharlieb reveals a more complex relationship between religious ideas and emergent medical knowledge and practice than has typically been represented.