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

In the 1870s, years before the first Swedish woman graduated from medical school, dozens of American-trained female physicians treated thousands of patients in a variety of colonized or semi-colonized countries such as India and China, sent out by Christian missionary organizations. These women require us to revise the predominantly national narratives of women’s admission to the medical profession. 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.

The project 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 and to what extent these pioneering “lady doctors” brought home new medical ideas from abroad.