Caring and curing : historical perspectives on women and healing in Canada

Summary: What has been the role of women in transcending the Canadian medical scene? How did women confront and challenge a gender ideology that sought to consign them to a passive role? What were the steps in their transition from domestic healers to professional health care providers? This collection of essays takes the reader from the early 19th century struggle between female midwives and male physicians right up to the late 20th century emergence of professionally trained women physicians vying for a place in the medical hierarchy. The bitter conflict for control of birthing and other aspects of domestic health care between female lay healers, particularly midwives, and the emerging male-dominated medical profession is examined from new perspectives. Far from being the passive recipients of change, women have pioneered in transcending the narrow focus on medicine, and have conceptualized "health care" as a broad, non-hierachical and co-operative interaction between the patient and team of health care professionals. By stressing the contributions women have made through nursing and lay health reform as well as traditional medicine, the authors demonstrate that women took a leading role in transforming Canadian health care in the late ninteenth and twentieth centuries.