Hospital with a Heart

Hospital with a Heart analyzes the dilemma that confronted nineteenth- and twentieth-century women doctors as they sought to preserve their all-women's institutions and to succeed in the male-dominated medical profession. It is at once women's history, medical history, institutional history, and a study of the impact of professionalization on women.

This book tells the story of one of the most important all-women's hospitals in America, the New England Hospital for Women and Children. For more than a century it provided women doctors with valuable clinical experience and professional training, and offered women patients medical care from doctors of their own sex. In an engrossing chronological narrative, Virginia Drachman shows how the fates of the hospital and of the women doctors who worked there were inextricably intertwined.

From its founding, the hospital provided women doctors with professional opportunities apart from men; eventually all-male medical institutions admitted women. The result, Drachman demonstrates, was a paradox: Separatism originally laid the path to equality for women in medicine, but integration gradually afforded a competing route to professional equality, challenging the separatist traditions of women doctors. By the turn of the century, the New England Hospital confronted its most formidable challenge: the opportunities of integration.

Drachman skillfully illuminates and balances two major themes in her interesting account: the history of women's struggle to gain acceptance in the medical profession, and the question that to this day provokes debate-whether separation from men or integration into male-dominated institutions is the best means of improving women's status in the professions and in society at large.