Book Review

Before there were breast cancer coalitions and women's health networks, there was the "problem" of women in medicine. The choices made by such pioneer professionals as Elizabeth Blackwell, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Alice Hamilton have stood as examples defining the "right" way women could and should practice medicine and, as the central focus of historical work, have powerfully shaped our understanding of gender in American medicine. Ellen S. More's insightful history of the experiences of diverse, ordinary American women doctors, with a focus on Rochester, New York, makes clear that the public and private lives of the great women doctors were hardly typical. More's wide-ranging study will engage historians, their students, and, I believe, health policy makers.

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Since the 1850s American women physicians have struggled to balance career with family and civic responsibility, navigating professional discrimination and private doubts. Sarah Adamson Dolley, who in 1851 became the third female M.D. in the United States, married a physician (a choice of around 25–30 percent of nineteenth-century American women doctors and of some 50–70 percent of married women doctors today) and established a joint practice with him in Rochester. After his early death, she raised her son as a single woman professional, balancing motherhood, private practice, and social reform work. Unlike their contemporary Blackwell in New York City, Dolley and her sister Rochester doctors quite easily adopted the germ theory, participated in dissections, conducted animal experiments, and performed gynecological surgery; like Blackwell, they strongly resisted alternative women healers, especially "doctresses" who performed abortions.

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