In our final session we will consider the role played by women as doctors and nurses focusing on questions of training and professionalism and women’s campaigns to access medical education. We will explore how gender shaped ideas and understandings of women medical practitioners.

Seminar/essay questions:

• What role did reform and education play in shaping the ‘modern’ profession of nursing?
• Why was there opposition to women doctors?
• Why had attitudes changed towards women in medicine by 1900?

Required reading:

• Claire Brock, ‘Surgical Controversy at the New Hospital for Women, 1872–1892’, Social History of Medicine (2011) 24: 608-623.
• Judith Godden and Carol Helmstadter, ‘Woman’s Mission and Professional Knowledge: Nightingale Nursing in Colonial Australia and Canada’, Social History of Medicine (2004) 17: 157-174.

Additional reading:

• Antoinette Burton, ‘Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make "Lady Doctors for India," 1874-1885’ Journal of British Studies (1996) 35; 3: 368-397.
• Celeste Chamberland, ‘Partners and Practitioners: Women and the Management of Surgical Households in London, 1570–1640’, Social History of Medicine (2011) 24: 554-569.
• Robert Dingwall, Anne Marie Rafferty and Charles Webster, An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing (London: Routledge, 1988).
• Jean Donnison, ‘Medical Women and Lady Midwives: A Case Study in Medical and Feminist Politics’, Women’s Studies, (1976) 3, 229-250.
• Alison S. Fell and Christine E. Hallett (eds), First World War Nursing: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2013).
• Laura Kelly, ‘The turning point in the whole struggle’: the admission of women to the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland’, Women's History Review (2013) 22;1: 97-125.
• Susan McGann, Anne Crowther and Rona Dougall, A History of the Royal College of Nursing 1916-90: A Voice for Nurses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
• Ellen S. More, Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850-1995 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
• B. Mortimer and S. McGann, New Directions in the History of Nursing: International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2005).
• Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
• Anne Marie Rafferty, Jane Robinson and Ruth Elkan (eds), Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare (London : Routledge, 1997).
• Anne Summers, ‘Pride & Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War’, History Workshop Journal, 16 (1983), 33-56.
• Kristine Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
• Ruth Watts, ‘Universities, Medical Education and Women: Birmingham in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, History of Education. May2013, Vol. 42 Issue 3, p306-319.
• K. Williams, ‘From Sarah Camp to Florence Nightingale: A Critical Study of Hospital Nursing Systems from 1840-1897’, in C. Davies (ed.), Rewriting Nursing History (London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 41-75.