A Medicine of Their Own: The Stories of American Women Healers
introduces students to women's entrance to the medical
profession in the nineteenth century through readings in
fiction, autobiographical documents, and medical history.
Together, literary and historical sources open up a window into
women's traditional healing work, the constraints of race and
gender that they faced while medicine professionalized, and the
remarkable work that women accomplished as agents of social and
medical change. This module also provides guidelines and
resources for a class writing project, a biography of an early
woman doctor, using archival materials and sources from the
Changing the Face of Medicine exhibition. The biography project
demonstrates the importance of recovery work in women's history
and provides students with a hands-on opportunity to gain
awareness of audience while crafting prose for a political
purpose. The module consists of six one-hour classes. Each class
provides a selection of primary and secondary r