The contributors to this volume have written a synthetic overview of the history of the health experience of women in America. We see women as actors and reactors, as healers and patients, as well as objects of medical and sociological research. The contributors emphasize the theme of medicalization, that is, the increasing reach of professional medicine into areas previously considered outside the domain of medical practice. They also highlight the enlargement of our conceptions of health and medicine. We learn of the ideological, social, cultural, economic, technological, and scientific factors that influence our health beliefs and medical values.
Women's health / Adele E. Clarke
Pathways of health and death / Lois M. Verbrugge
Sexuality and woman's sexual nature / Nancy Sahli
Childbirth in America, 1650-1990 / Janet Carlisle Bogdan
Race as a factor in health / Edward H. Beardsley
Historical perspectives on women and mental illness / Nancy Tomes
Surgical gynecology / Judith M. Roy
Professionalization of obstetrics / Charlotte G. Borst
Women's reproductive health / Suzanne Poirier
Institutionalizing women's health care in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America / Joan E. Lynaugh
Women and sectarian medicine / Naomi Rogers
Self-help and the patent medicine business / Susan E. Cayleff
Charismatic women and health / Jonathan M. Butler, Rennie B. Schoepflin
Knowledge and power / Martha H. Verbrugge
Women's health and public policy / Molly Ladd-Taylor
Women's toxic experience / Anthony Bale
Midwives and history / Judy Barrett Litoff
Nurses / Ellen D. Baer
Physicians / Regina Morantz-Sanchez
Pharmacists / Gregory J. Higby