Physicians

Badri Teymourtash (1911-1989) is considered the first female Iranian doctor. Born to an influential Iranian family in 1911, and the sister of Iran’s second most powerful political personality during the early Pahlavi Dynasty, Abdolhossein Teymourtāsh, she was sent to Belgium in the late 1920s and enrolled in Dental School.

Upon graduating from Dental School, she is believed to have considered moving to the Belgian Congo to undertake humanitarian work. However, Abdolhossein Teymourtash’s fall from grace in 1932 prompted her to return to Iran where along with Teymourtash’s wife and children she endured eight years of house arrest and exile to the family’s farflung estates in Khorasan. After Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941, pursuant to a general amnesty, all political prisoners were released, and Badri Teymourtash moved to Mashad where she pursued dentistry.

In the 1960s she assisted in founding Mashad University’s School of Dentistry. During the 1980s the library at Mashad University’s School of Dentistry was renamed in her honour.

Yoshioka was born in what is now part of Kakegawa city, Shizuoka prefecture, where her father, a physician, advocated primary education for the village children. Yayoi grew up in the 19th century when women’s education was frowned upon. She graduated from the Saisei-Gakusha school of medicine, and received the 27th medical license granted to a woman in Japan. Realizing the difficulty of this career path for women in Japan, she resolved to start her own school of medicine, which she did before she was 30 years old.

The graduates of the Tokyo Women’s Medical School (renamed the Tokyo Women’s Medical University in 1998) were not allowed to practice medicine until 1912, when the Japanese government permitted women to enroll in the national medical examination. By 1930, almost a thousand women had gone through Yoshioka’s school.

Yayoi was politically active through her life. With many of her colleagues, she advocated sex education.[1] In the 1930s, Yayoi was involved in the Japanese women’s suffrage movement and the “Clean Elections” movement in Japan. In 1938, the Japanese government appointed Yayoi and ten other female leaders to the “Emergency Council to Improve the Nation’s Ways of Living,” a pre-war mobilization effort. She was a leading figure in various wartime patriotic women’s associations and youth associations. After the end of the war, she turned again to organizations promoting the education of women.

Yayoi was awarded the Order of the Precious Crown in 1955, and the Order of the Sacred Treasure posthumously in 1959.

The Yoshioka Memorial Prize was established to honor Yoshioka’s successors. The Japan Medical Women’s Association has named its two awards after Yoshioka Yayoi and Ogino Ginko (the first woman to be licensed as a physician in Japan).

Yayoi was depicted on an 80-yen Japanese commemorative postage stamp, on September 20, 2000 together with Naruse Jinzo and Tsuda Umeko. A memorial museum dedicated to Yayoi exists in Kakegawa, Shizuoka.

Yoshioka Yayoi (吉岡彌生 ?, April 29, 1871 - May 22, 1959) was a physician and women’s rights activist, who founded the Tokyo Women’s Medical University (東京女子医科大学 Tokyo Joshi Igaku Daigaku?) in 1900, as the first medical school for women in Japan. She was also known as Washiyama Yayoi.

Women’s participation in the medical professions was limited by law and practice during the decades while medicine was professionalizing.[2] However, women continued to practice medicine in the allied health fields (nursing, midwifery, etc.), and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women made significant gains in access to medical education and medical work through much of the world. These gains were sometimes tempered by setbacks; for instance, Mary Roth Walsh documented a decline in women physicians in the US in the first half of the twentieth century, such that there were fewer women physicians in 1950 than there were in 1900.[3] However, through the latter half of the twentieth century, women had gains generally across the board. In the United States, for instance, women were 9% of total US medical school enrollment in 1969; this had increased to 20% in 1976.[3] By 1985, women comprised 14% of practicing US physicians.[4]

At the beginning of the twenty-first century in industrialized nations, women have made significant gains, but have yet to achieve parity throughout the medical profession.[citation needed] Women have achieved parity in medical school in some industrialized countries, since 2003 forming the majority of the United States medical student body.[5] In 2007-2008, women accounted for 49% of medical school applicants and 48.3% of those accepted.[6]

However, the practice of medicine remains disproportionately male overall. In industrialized nations, the recent parity in gender of medical students has not yet trickled into parity in practice. In many developing nations, neither medical school nor practice approach gender parity.

Moreover, there are skews within the medical profession: some medical specialties, such as surgery, are significantly male-dominated,[7] while other specialties are significantly female-dominated, or are becoming so. In the United States, female physicians outnumber male physicians in pediatrics and female residents outnumber male residents in family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pathology, and psychiatry.[8][9]

Women continue to dominate in nursing. In 2000, 94.6% of registered nurses in the United States were women.[10]

Biomedical research and academic medical professions — i.e., faculty at medical schools — are also disproportionately male. Research on this issue, called the “leaky pipeline” by the National Institutes of Health and other researchers, shows that while women have achieved parity with men in entering graduate school, a variety of discrimination causes them to drop out at each stage in the academic pipeline: graduate school, postdoc, faculty positions, achieving tenure; and, ultimately, in receiving recognition for groundbreaking work.[11][12][13][14] (See women in science for a broader discussion.)

Historically and in many parts of the world, women’s participation in the profession of medicine (as physicians, for instance) has been significantly restricted, although women’s practice of medicine, informally, in the role of caregivers, or in the allied health professions, has been widespread. Most countries of the world now guarantee equal access by women to medical education, although not all ensure equal employment opportunities[1] and gender parity has yet to be achieved within the medical specialties and around the world.[citation needed]

Sophie Jan Thompson Womack (29 August 1954 - 17 February 2008) was an American physician, who broke boundaries in medical landscape for both women and African Americans. Her specialty was neonatology.

Womack was born in San Antonio, Texas to Clarence and Irene Thompson. She graduated from Howard University and Meharry Medical College. She received a master’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She was vice president of medical affairs for Harper University Hospital and Hutzel Women’s Hospital and a former division chief of neonatology at Sinai-Grace Hospital. From 2004 to 2006, she served as president of Detroit Medical Center’s medical staff. She was the first woman and African-American to hold that position.

She was married to the Rev. James Womack, MD and they shared two daughters Brandi and Ashley.

Along with her husband, Dr. Womack formed The Coalition Inc. — Circle of Hope, an organization that raised more than $1 million while promoting childhood health and well-being.

Willits was born in Macedon, New York, about 75 miles from Geneva. She was educated at Quaker schools. In 1892 she moved to Chicago to enroll in the Women’s Medical College of Chicago, then affiliated with (and later absorbed by) Northwestern University. After receiving her medical degree in 1896, Willits served her internship at the Women’s Hospital of Chicago.

In 1897, Willits moved to San Francisco as a resident at the Children’s Hospital (for Women and Children). When she completed her residency in 1900, she opened her own private practice, but maintained her affiliation with Children’s. She was initially a member of the surgical staff of the Department of Pediatrics, and later became chief of the Department of Surgical Diseases of Children. In 1921 she became the chair of the Department of General Surgery, a position she held until 1934. She is believed to be the first woman in the United States to head a surgery department. To add to her knowledge, she visited the Mayo Clinic several times over the course of her career; in 1923 she spent several months studying in Vienna. After stepping down from the chair position in 1934, she served as a consulting physician and surgeon.

During and after the time she held these hospital positions, Willits also maintained her private practice as a family doctor, retiring in 1941.

Willits was lesbian and throughout her adult life lived with her partner, Elizabeth Ristine.[2]

Willits lived quietly in San Francisco until her death at age 95.

Emma K. Willits (20 September 1869-9 April 1965) was a pioneering woman physician and surgeon who played an important role in the development of Children’s Hospital in San Francisco (now the California campus [Women and Children's Center] of the California Pacific Medical Center), serving as the head of the Department of General Surgery from 1921 to 1934.

She is believed to be the third woman to specialize in surgery in the United States.[1]

Priscilla White, M.D. (March 17, 1900 - December 16, 1989) was a pioneer in the treatment of diabetes during pregnancy and type 1 diabetes, and was also a founding member of the Joslin Diabetes Center.

White was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Quincy High School. She attended Radcliffe College before transferring to Tufts University Medical School, where she graduated third in her class. At the time, Harvard Medical School did not accept women. She served her internship at Worcester Memorial Hospital.

She joined the practice of Elliott P. Joslin M.D in 1924 and was immediately assigned the care of children with diabetes. She felt her greatest contribution to the field of diabetes was her work delineating the heredity, stages and treatment of type 1 diabetes, “although the pregnancy work was more spectacular.”[1] White wrote Diabetes in Childhood and Adolescence in 1934, and played an integral role in the establishment and operation of The Clara Barton Birthplace Camp for Diabetic Girls, often driving 65 miles to reach the camp after a full day of work.

She began her pioneering research on pregnancy in the late 1930s and soon showed the importance of strict blood glucose control and early delivery in ensuring the healthy delivery of newborns. In 1949, she introduced the White Classification of Diabetic Pregnancies, which classified patients according to their level of risk and tailored their treatment protocol accordingly. Levels of risk were determined by age at onset, duration, presence of atherosclerotic vascular disease and renal complications. In 1968, she added proliferative retinopathy to the risk factors. This classification was widely adopted and allowed doctors to partially predict the course of a woman with diabetes during pregnancy and the chances of newborn survival.

White advocated the importance of close supervision during pregnancy by a small obstetric and diabetic team, a concept that is still practiced today at the Pregnancy Clinic, a joint collaboration between The Joslin Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

When White began working at Joslin, the fetal success rate was 54 percent; when she retired in 1974, it would be over 90 percent. During her 50 years of work, White managed the deliveries of over 2200 women with diabetes and the supervision of some 10,000 cases of type 1 diabetes. After her retirement, she continued to work on the emotional problems of young people with diabetes.

She was the first woman to be invited to give the Banting Memorial Lecture and to receive the Banting Medal, the highest scientific award of the American Diabetes Association. Hobart and William Smith College cited her as one of the 12 outstanding women physicians of the world.

White died of a heart attack on December 16, 1989.

In the end of King Seongjong’s reign, while uinyeo were sent to attend parties and feasts held for official and private occasions, they were not invited along with gisaeng (female entertainers). King Yeonsangun, however, was a tyrant ruler known for enjoying parties changed this practice. In June of 1502, the king’s 8th year, uinyeo were sent to families who were holding a wedding to investigate marriage presents on the day that the family sent the dowry. The rationale for the investigation was that the rich people at that time wasted money for too luxurious wedding items. From that time onward, whenever a feast was held, uinyeo participated openly together with gisaeng, sitting on stone steps to the present of the king. They also began to learn music in addition to medicine.[4][2]

When the successor, King Jungjong ascended to the throne, uinyeo still served as uigi (medical entertainer) at court officers’ parties. After 1510, the fifth year of the King’s reign, the government prohibited uinyeo from attending parties by law several times, and forced them to go back to their original mission in medicine. In spite of this effort, the once strict morality was not rectified, and uinyeo still attended parties. At feasts, uinyeo who worked at naeuiwon (royal health clinic) wore a garima (a kind of crown) made with a black silk, while gisaeng wore a black po on their head. As uinyeo who belonged to hyeminseo (clinics for the public) were called “yakbang gisaeng” (entertainers of the medicine room) and regarded the first rated entertainers over other female official entertainers assigned to government offices.[4]

Due to their lowborn origin, uinyeo did not gain the same social status as male doctors and barely retained their existence as a group of the lowest class of society.[4]