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A copy of A Woman Surgeon by Rosalie Slaughter Morton was given to me, Dr. Marjorie Sirridge, by my parents the year I enrolled in college as a pre-medical student. I interpreted this gift as an endorsement of my ambitions. Morton's book, dedicated to all "daughters of Æsculapius," the Greek god of healing, was an inspiration as I anticipated my own career. The following is an excerpt from the preface:
Women doctors during the past fifty years have held a special place in the field of medicine. They have helped to humanize their profession as well as to administer their scientific knowledge. A woman physician sees life without its mask. To be sure, all physicians do to a certain extent. But a woman gets closer to the inner thought of other women in understanding many domestic and social factors in illness. She understands youth's vagaries and aspirations better because her mother heart has scientific facts to support intuition and sympathy. One of the joys of a doctor's life is to see the human soul convincing itself that mentally and spiritually it will not admit defeat. 1
Later I had the opportunity to give my own story to other readers, through an oral history project for women physicians, Regina Markell Morantz's book In Her Own Words. 2 But it was only after fifty years' experience as a physician that I first read Elizabeth Blackwell's autobiography and was impressed by her implacable persistence in seeking medical education for herself and for the women who came after her.
From such beginnings Brenda Pfannenstiel and I decided to pursue the autobiographical writings of women physicians for two purposes: to develop a comprehensive bibliography of English-language autobiographies and to learn what these women had to say about themselves and their experiences as women physicians, in their own words. We found well over one hundred autobiographical writings, about half of which were book length. Of these, some are about limited portions of their subjects' lives, such as another book by Morton that reports her travels, A Doctor's Holiday in Iran; others concern the life's work of the author. 3 These stories reflect the remarkable diversity of women physicians.
Many of these women wrote consciously as witnesses to important events both grand...