Mind map
Role of Women in Medicine
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Role of Women in Medicine
Nursing and Hospitals
- Before 1850
- Hospitals couldn't be afforded by the poor
- Often very dirty
- Most nurses were untrained
- Nursing considered an unacceptable profession
- Part of wages paid in gin
- Florence Nightingale
- From a rich background
- Parents were unhappy with decision to be a nurse because it wasn't considered a respectable profession
- Trained for 3 months in Germany
- Came back to UK and ran hospital for rich women but wasn't happy
- Crimean War (1854-56)
- 100,000 British soldiers killed/injured but many more fell ill through typhus and other diseases
- Florence was asked to take control of nursing in Scutari
- Took 38 nurses with her
- Horrified at conditions
- No toilets
- No cleaning basins, soaps, mops, towels or cleaning materials
- Wrote to government describing conditions and requesting what she needed (i.e. cleaning materials)
- Hired 200 builders to rebuild part of a ward
- Some doctors objected to being ordered around by a nurse but Florence persevered
- Reduced death rate from 40% to 2%
- Back in Britain
- Heralded as 'Lady with the Lamp'
- National hero
- Wrote a book called 'Notes on Nursing' to tell the government how to improve things
- Raised £44,000 to set up Britain's first nurse training school
- Also published 'Notes on Hospitals' which introduced new ideas about hospital design
- Well-ventilated, open, spacious
- Mistaken idea about miasma but right concept
- Heralded as 'Lady with the Lamp'
- Controversy
- She refused to believe in the Germ Theory and taught her nurses about miasma
- She may not have actually improved conditions in Scutari
- However she began to change the image of nursing
- She had the right idea about hospital improvements
- From a rich background
- Before 1850
Doctors
- Sophia Jex-Blake
- Life
- Born to physician father with traditional views on women's education
- Convinced to allow to go to university to become a maths tutor
- 1869 - convinced Edinburgh University to allow her to learn to be a doctor
- However they said that they couldn't provide a woman with a degree
- Achievements
- Took the university to court and lost
- Took her case to parliament and in 1875, a law was passed that meant women could not be restricted from gaining medical qualifications on grounds of gender
- Despite this, she qualified as a doctor in Ireland after gaining her degree in Switzerland
- In 1874, she co-founded the London School of 'Medicine for Women'
- Elizabeth Garret Anderson was also a co-founder
- Limitations on her success
- Father with traditional views
- Sexism and attitude toward women
- Men objecting to her presence at the university
- Life
- Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
- Couldn't get on any courses at university
- Some men agreed to tutor her privately and she passed the Apothecaries exam in 1865
- She was refused a license but won a court appeal and was given one
- However, they refused to pass any other students who studied privately
- 1869 - qualified abroad in Paris and achieved top grades
- Got on the Medical Register on return to Britain
- Showed how and inspired people to do the same
- Elizabeth Hoggon (1870)
- Elizabeth Walker (1872)
- Continued limitations
- Woman and would not have been very well respected
- Very long, arduous process
- Women still couldn't go to university in Britain
- 1874 - co-founded London School of Medicine for Women
- Attitudes in the 1850s
- People didn't think that women had the ability
- 1858 - General Medical Act, everyone had to put their names on General Medical Register in order to practise
- Only one woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, in 1858
- Qualified in USA
- Only one woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, in 1858
- English universities wouldn't accept them so they couldn't qualify
- Sophia Jex-Blake
World Wars
- Some women had to take the places of male doctors
- More wounded and so more medical staff needed