Review: "The Doctor Was a Woman" by Chris Enss

The Doctor Was a Woman by Chris Enss
Published February 2024 via TwoDot
★★★

The Doctor Was a Woman takes us through the stories of a number of women who practiced medicine in the American West before women were widely accepted in medicine. The Wild West was not necessarily more accepting—or would not necessarily have been more accepting, save for that services were so limited that anyone with skills could find their way, even if they were (gasp!) a woman. One thing that strikes me is that many of the women profiled here went into medicine later than we'd expect now; i.e., now it's more common for someone in the US to go straight from college to med school, and I imagine that was also more common for men at the time, but women faced so many more barriers, from lack of family support to med schools refusing to admit women.

As a book it's...okay. It's clear that the author is deeply passionate about the topic, but the writing is pretty flat. I suspect that part of that is just that information about these women and their lives is relatively hard to come by; some of them left writings of their own, but, well, we all know that men get more coverage in the history books than women do. The end of each chapter has a bit of writing from the time, either something that the doctor in question wrote in the course of her career or something that would have been relevant; I admit that I skimmed those parts, as they're probably more compelling to those with a specific interest in archaic medicine.

One thing that gave me a lot of pause: the descriptions all lean neutral-positive, even when the things these doctors were doing were...kind of appalling, by modern standards. Take Bethenia Owens-Adair: She studied such controversial topics as the sterilization of the criminally insane. Bethenia's analysis led her to believe that insanity and criminal actions were hereditary. Her famous work on the subject, entitled "Human Sterilization: Its Social and Legislative Aspects," was published in 1922 and brought her instant recognition in the field. Three years after Bethenia presented her findings, a sterilization statue [sic] was adopted as state law in Oregon (67). So...like...yay, eugenics...? I should be clear that 1) I'm not suggesting anything about the author's views and 2) we can't necessarily hold historical figures to today's standards, but I really, really wished there had been some discussion of, like, the difference between being renowned for something at the time and it being something that should still be celebrated or endorsed or tolerated today.

Two and a half stars; it's a pretty short book, but I'd recommend it mostly for people who have a really specific interest in the history of medicine and/or Wild West history.