Selected Readings
Adventures of a Female Medical DetectiveCall Number: WZ 100 G9 2016In Adventures of a Female Medical Detective, Guinan weaves together twelve vivid stories of her life in medicine, describing her individual experiences in controlling outbreaks, researching new diseases, and caring for patients the world over. Occasionally heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, Guinan's account of her pathbreaking career will inspire public health students and future medical detectives--and give all readers insight into that part of the government exclusively devoted to protecting their health.
Black Girls in White Coats by Call Number: WZ 80.5 W5 O8 2023I once heard someone say 'you cannot aspire to be something you have never seen.' This book is not only for every little Black girl out there who has dreamt of wearing a white coat and stethoscope but also for all the little Black girls that have not dreamt of it because they have never thought it a possibility.
Bold Women of Medicine by Call Number: WZ 80.5 W L1 2017Meet 21 determined women who have dedicated their lives to healing others. These courageous women from the 1800s to the present focused on finding cures, tending the sick and wounded, and healing with science and compassion.
The Doctors Blackwell by Call Number: WZ 100 N5 2021Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Exploring the sisters' allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph.
Endemic by Call Number: WC 506 G1 2023A Blueprint for Navigating Future Pandemics: Embrace an Endemic Reality Discover a roadmap to coexisting with new respiratory diseases and their variants using reason, science, courage, and compassion. In this book, Dr. Gandhi offers insights into the story, science, and politics of our journey so far, highlighting successes and challenges. With her expertise, clear reasoning and a 10-point plan, Dr. Gandhi equips readers to understand and prepare for the future, ensuring a well-informed and resilient society.
An Evolution of Empowerment by Call Number: WZ 305 J1 2023An Evolution of Empowerment: Voices of Women in Medicine and Their Allies is a powerful anthology in which Dr. Shikha Jain, a distinguished board-certified hematology and oncology physician, and Dr. Avital O-Glasser, an esteemed hospitalist and expert in perioperative medicine, bring together a collection of captivating pieces from Women in Medicine leg and curated by Dr. O'Glasser. An Evolution of Empowerment urges readers from all backgrounds to recognize the pressing need for change and growth in addressing healthcare gender inequities.
A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research by Call Number: WZ 80.5 W D3 2022They were surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, university lecturers, and medical researchers in correspondence with the most learned societies of their time.And then it all came crashing down.A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research is the story of the women who participated in that early Golden Age, and of a medical establishment closing ranks against them so effectively that, by the early Victorian era, they not only were barred from practicing medicine, but from so much as stepping into a classroom where medical topics were being discussed. It is the story of that intrepid band of reformers and pioneers who built back the women's medical profession from the ashes and constructed a thriving new community of researchers and practitioners who within a century had retaken not only the ground that had been lost, but boldly advanced to levels of fame and achievement unimaginable to any previous era.
Letter to a Young Female Physician by Call Number: WZ 305 K7 2021A poignant and funny exploration of authenticity in work and life by a woman doctor. In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"--a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. As she traces the arc of her life, Koven finds inspiration in literature and faces the near-universal challenges of burnout, body image, and balancing work with marriage and parenthood. Koven offers an indelible account, by turns humorous and profound, from a doctor, mother, wife, daughter, teacher, and writer who sheds light on our desire to find meaning, and on a way to be our own imperfect selves in the world.
Medicine Women by Call Number: WZ 80.5.W5 L9 1998Cathy 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.
Overcome: My Life in Pursuit of a Dream by Tracing the unforgettable tale of a little black girl from a small Ohio town who dared to dream above her station, this memoir captures the larger history of black people in America, from the arrival of Ellamae Simmons' ancestors aboard a slaving vessel in 1775, to the electrifying election of the nation's first African American president.Ellamae came of age at a time when even the most gifted Negro girls were expected to become domestics in white homes. But Ellamae yearned to study medicine, and she set about creating a world in which she could do just that. For most of her 97 years, she has been writing her story of struggle and triumph against the odds, refusing to let disappointment or heartbreak turn her aside.Delving into themes of inclusion and social justice, education and mental health, marriage and family, this is the story of a woman who wasn't content to just witness history, she went out and made her own.
The Scalpel and the Silver BearCall Number: Coming soon!The first Navajo woman surgeon combines western medicine and traditional healing. A spellbinding journey between two worlds, this remarkable book describes surgeon Lori Arviso Alvord's struggles to bring modern medicine to the Navajo reservation in Gallup, New Mexico--and to bring the values of her people to a medical care system in danger of losing its heart.
Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord Keynote Address at the University of Utah
Through Navajo Eyes
About the Author
Twice As HardPublication Date: 2023-01-24Black women physicians' stories have gone untold for far too long, leaving gaping holes in American medical history, in women's history, and in black history. It's time to set the record straight No real account of black women physicians in the US exists, and what little mention is made of these women in existing histories is often insubstantial or altogether incorrect. In this work of extensive research, Jasmine Brown offers a rich new perspective, penning the long-erased stories of nine pioneering black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a black woman first entered medical school.
What We Bring to the Practice of Medicine by Call Number: WZ 80.5 W5 G9 2023together a collection of short essays from women physicians working in diverse fields of medicine around the world. Through compassion, humor, and resiliency, their stories reveal the truth of what life is like for a variety of women in medicine. While men and women physicians face different challenges and bring different historical experiences to the examination table, the history of medicine has been primarily told by men. Doctors Kimberly Greene-Liebowitz and Dana Corriel compile the pieces in this collection to highlight the many topics of concern for women physicians--some of which may be unknown to medical field outsiders
Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine by Call Number: WZ 80.5 W8 2008 c.2This volume examines the wide-ranging careers and diverse lives of American women physicians, shedding light on their struggles for equality, professional accomplishment, and personal happiness over the past 150 years. Illuminating the ethnic, political, and personal diversity of women physicians, the book reveals them as dedicated professionals who grapple with obstacles and embrace challenges, even as they negotiate their own health, sexuality, and body images, the needs of their patients, and the rise of the women's health movement.
About the Authors
Mary Guinan is an American doctor specializing in public health, virology, and epidemiology. She is the dean at the School of Community Health Sciences[1] at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.[2] Guinan is known for her work in the initial investigation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).[3] The book and subsequent film And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts documented her efforts regarding these issues; she was played by Glenne Headly.[4] Later on, she became the first female State Health Officer appointed to the Nevada government. Guinan also became president of the American Medical Woman's Association, after 40 years of membership.[5]
Dr. Jovita Ugochi N. Oruwari
Jovita Oruwari, MD, FACS, is fellowship trained from Brown University Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, in breast diseases.
Susan M. Latta
Susan M. Latta holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Hamline University. She has written on history, biography, and geography topics for Appleseeds and Faces magazines and contributed freelance projects to Heinemann Leveled Books and ABDO Publishing. She is the recipient of the Loft Literary Center’s Shabo Award for Children’s Picture Book Writers. She lives in Edina, Minnesota.
Janice P Nimura
Janice P. Nimura received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, was a New York Times Notable book in 2015. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, The Rumpus, and LitHub, among other publications.
Monica Gandhi, M.D.
Dr. Monica Gandhi is an expert in infectious diseases, specializing particularly in the care of patients with HIV and AIDS.
In her research, Gandhi has a special interest in HIV in women, including differences between women and men in exposure to antiretroviral medication and responses to therapy. Her work on these subjects has been widely published.
Gandhi has received many awards, including one from the National Institutes of Health’s Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health program and an early career faculty award from the Hellman Fellows Program.
Dale Debakcsy
Dale DeBakcsy has written the popular bi-weekly Women In Science column at Women You Should Know since 2014, creating a freely accessible archive of in-depth and rigorously researched articles detailing the history of women professionals in all branches of STEM. His previous titles in Pen and Sword's Trailblazers in STEM series include A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research and A History of Women in Astronomy and Space Exploration. He is a history and STEM teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives with his wife, two children, and a varying number of chickens.
Avital Y. O'Glasser, MD, & Shikha Jain, MD
Dr. Avital O’Glasser is a hospitalist and associate professor of medicine within the Division of Hospital Medicine, Department of Medicine, and Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). Her clinical practice focus is perioperative medicine, and she is the Medical Director of OHSU’s Preoperative Medicine Clinic.
She is passionate about the multidisciplinary, comprehensive practice of perioperative medicine as an internist. In addition to perioperative medicine, her academic interests include analyzing the role and effectiveness of social media within healthcare, particularly Twitter. She additionally engages her passion for examining and promoting the overlap between medicine and novel or non-traditional scholarship, for example exploring and advocating how we can capture impact and reach of non-traditional work such as digital scholarship on CVs and applications.
Dr. Shikha Jain practices in the Department of Hematology & Oncology at UI Health. A medical oncologist, Dr. Jain specializes in colorectal cancer, neuroendocrine tumors, and hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer). She works with her patients as a team to treat the disease and helps them move through an often difficult process together with as little stress as possible. Dr. Jain believes in personalized and individualized care, and she feels the more knowledge a patient has about their own disease, the more informed a decision they are able to make. She is an assistant professor of Medicine and the director of Communication Strategies in Medicine in the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and the associate director of Oncology Communication & Digital Innovation at the University of Illinois Cancer Center.
Suzanne Koven
Suzanne Koven received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training and chief residency in medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for over 30 years. She is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and holds the Valerie Winchester Family Endowed Chair in Primary Care Medicine at Mass General. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, NewYorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in The Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association. At HMS Dr. Koven co-created and co-directs the Media and Medicine certificate program at and teaches in the Media, Medicine and Health masters program. She speaks to a wide variety of audiences on literature and medicine and the role of women in medicine. Her essay collection, Letter to a Young Female Physician, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021. Her memoir, The Mirror Box, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2026.
Cathy Luchetti
Cathy Colligan Luchetti (born June 1945) is an American author whose photographic history books chronicle the American frontier through the stories of pioneer men, women, evangelists, as well as through themes of courtship, love, marriage, cooking, and children. The books are among the first to examine history through the voices of unsung overland travelers as well as through first person accounts by minorities.
Ellamae Simmons, MD
Simmons graduated from Mount Vernon High School and hoped to study medicine and become a doctor. She was denied student housing and admission by Ohio State University.[4][1] Instead, she attended Hampton Institute in Virginia, studying nursing.[4]
She went on to integrate the United States Army Nurse Corps as one of eight Black nurses during World War 2. After her service, she was finally admitted to The Ohio State University, studying pre-med. She was the first Black woman to live in an on-campus dormitory at the university.[1] From OSU, she went on to Howard University College of Medicine, graduating with her MD in 1959.[3][5]
Simmons completed her residency in and later a Fellowship in Allergy, Asthma and Immunology at National Jewish Hospital in Denver.[1][2]
Simmons found work in 1964 at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco hospital after a harrowing job interview that lasted several days.[2][1] She published her autobiography, Overcome: My Life in Pursuit of a Dream, in 2017 at the age of 97.[1][4]
Lori Arviso Alvord
Alvord is the first Navajo woman to be certified in surgery. She attended Stanford University to gain the technical and clinical skills needed to perform surgery. She also listened to the lessons of the healers of her tribe who use songs, symbols, and ceremonies with families and neighbors to provide comfort and speed recovery. She continues to perform surgery and is still seen as a role model for the Navajo community. In her practice, she bridges two worlds of medicine—traditional Navajo healing and conventional Western medicine—to treat the whole patient. She provides culturally competent care to restore balance in her patients' lives and to speed their recovery.
Jasmine Brown
Jasmine Brown began writing TWICE AS HARD when she was twenty-two. A 2018 recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship, she used her time at the University of Oxford to complete the in-depth research and oral histories synthesized in this book. In the spring of 2020, she graduated from Oxford with Merit, earning an M.Phil. in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. That fall, she began medical school at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Brown leverages her connection to her topic to create a work that is both immensely well-researched and personal.
Brown has been involved in advocacy work for many years. While in college, at Washington University in St. Louis, she founded the Minority Association of Rising Scientists and served as its president, working to provide minority students with resources to get involved in research as well as a community to support them along the way. It was her childhood dream to help increase the number of underrepresented minorities in science and medicine. Through her debut book and outreach efforts, she plans to do just that.
Ellen S. More, Elizabeth Fee, and Manon Parry
Ellen S. More is a historian of the American medical profession. She is Professor Emeritus (Psychiatry) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and author of Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995 and co-editor of Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine.
Elizabeth Fee (December 11, 1946 – October 17, 2018), also known as Liz Fee, was a historian of science, medicine and health. She was the Chief of the United States National Library of Medicine History of Medicine Division.[1]
Manon S. Parry, PhD, is an historian of medicine and exhibition curator, specializing in the uses of the humanities for health and wellbeing. She is Professor of Medical History at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU), and Associate Professor in American Studies and Public History at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). She is a member of the World Health Organization’s new Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural and Cultural Insights, and co-author, with Nancy Tomes, of the first historical report published by the Behavioural and Cultural Insights Unit at WHO/Europe (“Infodemics in Historical Perspective,” 2022). She leads the MA History: Medical and Health Humanities at the VU and directs the PULSE Network for Health Humanities: www.pulsenetwork.nl
Kimberly Greene-Liebowitz & Dana Corriel
Kimberly Greene-Liebowitz is a board-certified emergency physician who has worked in hospitals and urgent care centers throughout metropolitan New York. In the past few years, she has segued to writing, editing and advocacy. She earned her medical degree at Temple University School of Medicine and completed her training at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Prior to her career in clinical medicine, Greene-Liebowitz earned a Master of Public Health in epidemiology at The George Washington University and a Bachelor of Arts in biology/biochemistry at Cornell University. She has worked with major healthcare consulting, pharmaceutical and public health organizations, which has given her a broad view of healthcare and the ability to see how its facets interconnect. She is a critical thinker and consults original sources and research to inform her decisions.
Dana Corriel is a board-certified internist who decided to shift gears mid-career to become a digital healthcare expert and entrepreneur. Dr. Corriel founded SoMeDocs – the site you’re on this very moment – to empower doctors, and promote their autonomy, by helping them build accounts online that help establish their authority as the experts in health. Dr. Corriel now works as a freelance consultant to both professionals and large companies, strategizing on growth and building unique digital content and pathways for businesses and brands that want to stand out.