Week 7: Reflection

 This week I got to study the forgotten women of medicine. Sometimes it can be very hard to remember that right now isn't the way things have always been, and that women were wise women before men were ever physicians. It's very important to remember this while women are fighting for equal pay in the medical field. Society also makes a bigger deal out of women being nurses than doctors, which is very frustrating as this even influence's children and how they think about medicine. There is a famous online picture of a little girl in a pink future nurse shirt whereas the little boy is in a blue future doctor shirt, which became the subject of online controversy. When asked to draw a doctor people are more likely to draw a man than a woman, because that is what society shows more in our media and books. It's been really great learning about all the women from the past who have made amazing medical advances from their kitchens and homes who have been erased by the present day. My two questions from last week were what is the history of sexism in medicine look like? and at what point did women stop becoming the healers? For the first one, women were relatively undisturbed as healers despite facing controversy until the 16th century when witchcraft became more of an accusation and it got more difficult for women to practice until Elizabeth Blackwell, when it started getting easier little by little, but we are still facing hardships in medicine and are still looking for equal rights. The biggest turning point was likely the College of Physicians. Because women were not allowed to be licensed people stopped trusting them, and it became more popular to not allow women to be in medicine and more sexist medical rumors popped up. I find this in parallel to women being allowed to vote, as land owning widows were allowed to vote until the men in charge specifically made it illegal for women to vote, as women were allowed to practice until they specifically weren't. My questions for next week are how did native healers' practices change after Christianity? and how did Christianity affect medicine in general?