There is evidence of women being a part of medicine since as early as 2700 BC. However in the past 160 years women have become much more common in the medical field. The first woman to receive a medical degree in America was Elizabeth Blackwell in the 1840's. She, along with her sister and another women, established a hospital for women and children in New York several years later. The involvement of women in medicine was still uncommon until the 1970's when the women's rights movement helped to push for more women in medicine and less barriers to becoming a doctors for women. There were more women graduates in medicine from 1970 to 1980 than there had been in the past forty years combined. Today women still face adversity in terms of pay and discrimination but, if the trend continues, women should become more or less equal to men in the future.
All this information is good for women in medicine and it's awful to think about how they faced so much discrimination in the past. Women held a lot of unofficial roles in medicine before these events such as being midwives and working on female patients because men wouldn't. This is interesting because it follows the general transition of women in society from being seen as someone to take care of children and the house to the more modern outlook on women as equals. Even the beginnings of women in official medicine were as caretakers of women and children. I hope women continue to take steps toward becoming equal in the medical field.
-Alex Wallace
"Women in Medicine Timeline," AMA, 1 Oct. 2016, http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/our-people/member-groups-sections/women-physicians-section/women-medicine-history/women-in-medicine-timeline.page
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