Hospital with a heart. Women doctors and the paradox of separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862–1969

VIRGINIA G. DRACHMAN, Hospital with a heart. Women doctors and the paradox of separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862-1969. Cornell University Press, 1984, 8vo, pp. 258, illus., $19.95. This book is the first full-length study of an all-women's hospital in America. It traces the history of the New England Hospital from its opening by Dr Marie Zakrewska in 1862 to its eventual closure in 1969. The author sets out to contextualize the hospital against a background of changing opportunities for women, as well as changes in medical science. Her approach enables us to see women doctors both as women in a male-dominated and initially sexually-segregated society, and as members of the medical profession. The main thrust of Virginia Drachman's argument-that increasing acceptance of women doctors by the medical profession as a whole eroded the perceived need for a separatist hospital-is convincing. Her unravelling of the different strands of opinion, amongst feminists and non-feminists alike, which surrounded the opening of the hospital, and the turn-of-the-century debate on the continuing value of separatism, is rich and subtle. Friends were found in incongruous places-like Edward H. Clarke, professor of materia medica at Harvard Medical College, and author of Sex in education; or, a fair chance for girls (1873), who opposed co-education on the grounds that women's reproductive physiology would be endangered by strenuous intellectual activity, but joined the consulting staff of the New England Hospital in 1873. Promotion of the hospital's "homelike environment", and director Ednah Dow Cheney's emphasis on the "natural sympathy" women doctors could extend to sick children, suggest an initially unproblematic sense of continuity between women's contemporary role in the family, and their professional role as physicians. The synchronous expansion of scientific medicine and of opportunities for women in the medical profession provided a double axis for change. Drachman's description of conflicts between the doctors and directors, and different generations of medical staff at the New England Hospital gives a textured and refreshing picture of tensions between women concerned to promote their interests within the profession as a whole, as well as to protect the hospital. Focusing on the hospital's administrative history as evidence of the dilemmas confronting female physicians in the latter decades of the nineteenth century has consequences for the book as an institutional history. It is less than fully informative on the details of medical practice at the hospital, and how distinctive this was from other contemporary practice, particularly by male physicians. The children's hospital and its relation to the rest of the institution are only briefly described. This book is a rich resource, however, for anyone interested in the history of women doctors and their relation to the medical profession as a whole.