In 1903, Dr. Sarah Boyd Jones co-founded the Richmond Hospital to ensure the Black community had access to quality care and a training ground for nurses during the Jim Crow era. She was one of the most important members of Richmond’s “Black Wall Street” era using her wealth to expand access to healthcare by providing free clinics for women and children daily. Also a doctor, her husband Miles Jones works with her to advance their goals for social justice. Dr. Sarah Boyd Jones’ free daily clinic reserved one hour specifically for women and children, identifying unmet needs and working tirelessly to heal the black community from the harms caused by the societal illnesses of racial and gendered Injustice.

Reading Balm in Gilead by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot today. It’s an intimate biography of Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence by her daughter. Dr. Morgan Lawrence was one of the first Black female psychoanalysts. The biography covers her trajectory providing important context for her motivations, her collective challenges and her shared triumphs.

The book illustrates dimensions of the social and intellectual evolution of healers within a system that does not value equity, the whole person, or holistic approaches.

The book includes a letter from Dr. Morgan challenging the design of the curriculum at Meharry. The letter is specific to institutional circumstances in the 1940s that sound eerily familiar to the present, a fact that makes this prying all the more interesting. We tend to think of medical students and medical school as being very different. But here we find her advocating for students being conveyor-belted through the same systems as the rest of us, curricula that underdevelop our faculties for empathy and critical inquiry.

I love how this book is a collection of these understated yet radical acts of a Black woman using her voice as a healer in a world that refuses to the the multilayered aspect of health and wellness.

I know there’s a lot of eye-rolling at the whole “women taking up space” narrative, and I get that, but I just gotta say… some women really do need to be told that it’s okay for them to take up space. That they have a right to take up space and exist in public.

Last week I was doing rounds with another female med student, and on our break we went to the staff cafeteria to get coffee. We grabbed our coffee and sat down at a table and were chatting for a bit, and eventually the cafeteria started to fill up as more of the med students went on their break and came in for coffee. We had barely finished a third of our coffee when she leaned forward and asked me, “Should we get up so someone can use this table?”

I just stared at her for a moment, then finally answered, “WE are using this table.”

I know it’s kind of “baby’s first feminism” but if there are any women out there who genuinely need to hear it: you have a right to take up space. You have a right to exist in public. You have just as much of a right to be there in the staff cafeteria, sitting at a staff table, and using a staff chair, as any other med student does.

Why Being a “Rule-Based Country” Is Just a Geography Test for Women

The rule-based country narrative operates by turning complex societies into moral shortcuts. We see this when people invoke Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan as the only possible outcomes for women in the East. This binary creates a world where you are either a liberated Western citizen or a victim waiting for rescue. Is it possible that freedom is a lived practice rather than a passport…

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Tell me your symptoms, I’ll give you the cure. 😉

Today one of the doctors said to the medical students “You need to put yourself in the pants of your patients and see things from their point of view” and I am definitely going to be thinking about that every day for the rest of my life.

Zimbabwe’s only female heart surgeon on medicine, misogyny and making a difference

“I had to do as much as men when I was training. When I came back, I had to [do] double the amount of work as my male colleagues to prove that I know what I am doing.”

Even so, she adds: “In the private practice, there are people who simply do not refer [patients] to me because I am a woman. And they do not think the calibre of training I received is the same. There is this misconception that women have it easier.”

Kanyepi says this is the downside of being a pioneer in her field in Zimbabwe. “When people talk about the first female, they think it is all glamour, glory and excitement. But there is always the other side. You have to navigate being the only one,” she says.

Patriarchy kills and hurts women in every possible way but especially scientifically. Our bodies have been ignored, dismissed and actively erased from medical research. Our saliva is more acidic than men’s, yet dental products are built for male mouths. Fibromyalgia and autoimmune diseases that overwhelmingly affect women are barely even acknowledged and researched. Unlike Parkinson’s disease, which affects men more so it has received decades of research and attention. Gynecological care is still outdated, painful and lacking basic innovation or care. Clinical trials continue to underrepresent women which leaves decades of questions unanswered. Only now that women are more involved in science and medicine, are these truths even being acknowledged. Patriarchy doesn’t just oppress, it endangers women, it erases us and it actively kills at every level.

Gender differences in the saliva of young healthy subjects before and after citric acid stimulation - PubMed

Sheila Cassidy

Dr. Sheila Cassidy was born in 1937 in Cranwell, Lincolnshire, England. Dr. Cassidy worked at a clinic in a working-class area of Santiago, Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In 1975, she was arrested after she provided medical care to an opponent of the regime. Dr. Cassidy was imprisoned for two months, during which time was subjected to torture. She detailed her experience as a torture survivor in her 1977 book, Audacity to Believe. After returning to England, Dr. Cassidy became medical director of St. Luke’s Hospice, a position she held for fifteen years.

Louisa Aldrich-Blake

Dr. Louisa Aldrich-Blake was born in 1865 in Chingford, Essex, England. Dr. Aldrich-Blake was the UK’s first female surgeon. During World War I, she worked at a field hospital in France, earning the nickname “Madame Générale” from her patients. She served as Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women, and pioneered new procedures to treat rectal and cervical cancer.

Dr. Louisa Aldrich-Blake died in 1925 at the age of 60.

Image source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ggbain-38145]

The Nation’s First Black Female Doctor Blazed a Path for Women in Medicine. But She Was Left Out of the Story for Decades

Princess Charming Gigi

Aesthetic: Glam/Romantic

Vibe: Bubbly, elegant, emotional but with MC confidence

Profession: Socialite turned pediatric surgeon

Fandoms: Greys Anatomy, Barbie (2023), Disney Princesses, To All The Boys I Loved Before

Femininity and Intelligence aren’t mutually exclusive

Motherhood is not the end of ambition

Disney Princess stories are empowering

You aren’t a “basic” girl, they’re just jealous

dating Harper, thanks for the fun night @lizzy-the-musician

Out Of Character:

This is a blog based on my OC so I can get into her head about life.

If you don’t like it, don’t interact.

Dr. Anna Ross Lapham, the first woman to teach at Northwestern University Medical School

Dr. Caroline Hedger, who wrote about poor working conditions for meat packing workers in Chicago, largely confirming Upton Sinclair’s depictions in The Jungle.

During World War I, she moved to Belgium to work with refugees and prevent the spread of typhoid.

Catherine Threlkeld (née Farrar, later Byrdia), the first woman physician and county health commissioner in Oklahoma

Drinking DQ vanilla milkshakes to cure my constipation.

ALT

A hound riding on a rabbit and a rabbit riding on a snail battle with shields and lances. The Breviary of Renaud de Bar (Winter portion), Metz, France, 1302-03: Yates Thompson MS 8, f. 294r

I have had so much fun poking around digital publications of medieval manuscripts tonight that I feel like sharing. It started as a way to bring ✨whimsy✨ to my lecture slide deck tomorrow but then I fell down the medievally murderous-type rabbit hole. Most of that is thanks to this British Library blog that goes all the way back to 2010, which I believe makes it an historical relic itself. Featured images that made me feel the grounding weight of history: Joan of Arc’s beautiful signature, a woman physician from King Henry the Jerk’s time, a Tree of Dicks, and many more.

And yes, I will acknowledge the ridiculous nerd credential of sprucing up my lecture slides with medieval illustrations. I’ve given this lecture for 4 years now and once I made sure to update the actual medicine for current recommendations I needed a theme. Last week I tried out making things look 80’s for a new lecture and that made me more happy than I thought it would. I figured medieval open source images could work and by golly did they ever.

So now, in addition to my year long quest to source some outfits for the upcoming renaissance faire, I have another medieval source of fun that more easily squishes into the bill-paying academia part of life. I hope my students will get a kick or even a sensible chuckle out of these illustrations. And I hope the same for you, my tumblr friends.

One of their latest features: https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2025/02/medieval-women-manuscripts-now-online.html

A friendly reminder that we should all be advocating for medicine to take seriously women’s pain—especially black women’s pain.

When I was in the hospital and I needed an Advil for muscle pain, I had to contextualize it against a spinal tap for a doctor to listen.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2201180

Yes, I should probably be saying “afab” but let’s be real—this is more an issue with perception than actual physiology or biology.

Anandibai Gopalrao Joshi (31 March 1865 – 26 February 1887) was the first Indian female doctor of western medicine. She was the first woman from the erstwhile Bombay presidency of British India to study and graduate with a two-year degree in western medicine in the United States. She was also referred to as Anandibai Joshi and Anandi Gopal Joshi (where Gopal came from Gopalrao, her husband’s first name).

very disturbed because i’ve never thought about it before but one of our obgyn lecturers was telling us how weird it is that as we age and things go wrong women just. lose parts of our bodies. potential breast cancer? bye bye boobs. something up with your uterus? see ya! suspicious looking ovary? ah you have another one anyways. like sorry i’m actually attached to that thanks.