Medical Mobilities: Nineteenth-century Female Physicians in a Colonial World

Starting in 1869, almost two decades before the first Swedish woman graduated from medical school, dozens of North American female physicians treated thousands of patients in a variety of colonized or semi-colonized countries such as India and China. These women were sent out by Christian missionary organizations, but worked in a significantly different role and have received considerably less scholarly attention than ordinary missionaries. In this project, we argue that these women require us to revise the predominantly national narratives of women’s admission to the medical profession. We demonstrate that medical missionary work provided women with an early and important arena in which to build a professional identity when most paths were still closed to them. These physicians then actively used their position to extend medical training to even more women. Medical Mobilities will investigate how their work as doctors far from their home social contexts influenced the gradual acceptance of female physicians in their countries of origin. It will also consider how these pioneering “lady doctors” influenced the rapidly changing overseas societies in which they worked and brought home new medical ideas from abroad.