Why Patients Treated by Female Doctors Are Less Likely To Die
In the doctor’s office gender does matter, yet another study finds
In 1869, the dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania proudly brought her students to the Saturday teaching clinics at the Pennsylvania Hospital.
For years, she had been seeking permission for them to observe the clinicians at work. But when managers finally agreed, the female students didn’t exactly receive a warm welcome. Droves of male medical students turned out in front of the hospital to harass, verbally abuse and throw items at their passing female peers — including paper, tinfoil, and… ‘tobacco juice’ — which later came to be known as The Jeering Episode.
Just a year later, in 1870, a similar incident occurred in Edinburgh when a small group of female medical students — including Sophia Jex-Blake, the first practising female doctor in Scotland — were violently harassed by a mob of men while on their way to sit an anatomy exam. But this was just the culmination of months of abuse levelled at them.
Women in medicine have struggled with acceptance for a very long time — although they have always existed, even when they were almost entirely excluded from formal practice — thanks to the bioessentialist belief that they aren’t ‘naturally’…
