top of page
ALL POSTS


War, Fame and Surgery: The Amazing Life of Margaret Chung, the First ABC Woman Surgeon
Her mother was raised in a brothel, and her son was Ronald Reagan. Take any section of Dr Margaret Chung’s (1889–1959) life, and lay it...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


Too Bright: Dr Anandibai Joshee, India’s First Woman Medical Doctor
At 9 years old, a girl named Yamuna Joshee was married to her tutor, a man twenty years her senior, who thereupon changed her first name...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


Killer of Cancer, Slayer of Viruses: The Many Medicines of Nobel Prize Laureate Gertrude Elion
Generally, our experience of a particular medicine is as a great faceless thing the name of which we do not know until we desperately...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


The Last of the Women Physicians: Dorothea Leporin Erxleben.
Prior to the eighteenth century, the answer to the question, ‘Who was allowed to practise medicine?’ was relatively simple: just about...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


Breaking the Shackles Procreative: Margaret Sanger and the Creation of the Pill
In 1912, it was against the law in the United States to publish a book that contained descriptions of birth control methods. It was...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


The Experimentalist: The Tale of Mary Putnam Jacobi vs. Proper Victorian Medicine
As we have seen, the nineteenth century boasts a rich roster of medical women, any one of whom is the stuff of heroes: the trailblazing...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


Lady Mary Montagu and Europe’s First Tool Against Smallpox
In the seventeenth century, smallpox ravaged Europe with a persistent ferocity beyond reckoning. At its height, it killed 400,000...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


‘I Doubled My Fist’ Sara Josephine Baker and the Fight for Child Hygiene
How deep can hopelessness go? Is there a lower limit, a solid floor against which we can push and thrust ourselves back into some...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â


The Path of Most Resistance: Sophia Jex-Blake and the Fight for Women’s Medical Education
She had founded first England’s and then Scotland’s first medical school for women, and been instrumental in the passing of the Medical...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 22, 2023
Â
Â
bottom of page


