"Tracing the participation of women in the medical profession from the colonial period to the present, Regina Morantz-Sanchez examines women's roles as nurses, midwives, and practitioners of folk medicine in early America; recounts their successful struggles in the nineteenth century to enter medical schools and found their own institutions and organizations; and follows female physicians into the twentieth century, exploring their efforts to sustain significant and rewarding professional lives without sacrificing the other privileges and opportunities of womanhood" (publisher). 

"In the spring of 1889, Brooklyn's premier newspaper, the Daily Eagle, printed a series of articles that detailed a history of midnight hearses and botched operations performed by a scalpel-eager female surgeon named Dr. Mary Dixon-Jones. The ensuing avalanche of public outrage gave rise to two trials--one for manslaughter and one for libel--that became a late nineteenth-century sensation" (publisher).