To The Ends Of The Earth Women's Search For Education In Medicine [Paperback]

In this engagingly written book Thomas Bonner unveils the dramatic story of womens long struggle to become physicians. Focusing both on international comparisons and on the personal histories of many of the pioneers, their determination and dedication, their setbacks and successes, he shows how European and American women gradually broke through the wall of resistance to women in medicine. In preCivil War America, in Tsarist Russia, in Victorian England, special schools of medicine for women were widely established as early as 1850 as a kind of way-station on the road to medical coeducation. Only in Switzerland and France, at first, could women study medicine in classes with men. As a result, hundreds and then thousands of women from Russia, Eastern Europe, England, and the United States enrolled in Swiss or Parisian universities to gain the first-class education that was denied them at home. Coming almost literally from the ends of the earth, they formed the largest migration of professional women in history.An essential reference for anyone studying the historical, social, economic, and psychological currents that affected many countries ability to make full use of the talent of half the potential candidates for a medical education. It is also a tribute to the women in many countries who persisted, against extraordinary odds, in pursuing a profession that they found irresistibly challenging and gratifying.A fresh examination of the different strands of [womens] long and intense struggle for medical training.A clearly written and comprehensive historical account of the evolving national, legal, and educational structures bearing on womens medical education and licensing.To the Ends of the Earthis an absorbing chronicle of womens struggle to gain entrance to the medical schools of the industrializing nations of Europe, Imperial Russia, and North America from the mid-nineteenth century up to the end of the first World War. Bonner has made excellent usel3%