March 2026 News You Can Use Editorial

 By Marie Leger, MD, PhD

WDS News You Can Use Committee

Going to medical school was an honor for me. As products of the American dream, both my sister and I went to graduate school, but the women in my family who came before us, including my mom, my grandmothers, my eight aunts, did not go to college. My mom worked as a legal secretary in San Francisco. When I think of my mom in that era, I think of Joan in Mad Men, fending off advances, clearly brilliant, navigating not just grammar and shorthand, but business decisions, personalities, and her male colleagues. When she worked in San Francisco in the 1960s and ‘70s, her law firm had 25 attorneys, all of them men, and the secretaries were all women. She says, “It was a really big deal the day my friend Pat came to work wearing pants instead of a dress, and all of the other secretaries came running down to our cubicles to observe her.”

Medicine has its own version of this story. As I was interviewing for my internal medicine preliminary year, I remember seeing a similar dramatic shift in the medical workforce when walking through the corridors of schools such as Cornell and the University of Chicago, looking at the photos of their resident classes. The remarkable moustaches, polyester, and sideburns of the ‘70s stood out, but so did the composition of the photographs over the decades: the Fitzpatrick skin types of the residents, the length of their hair, and slowly, unmistakably, the growing number of women’s faces looking back at me.[1]

I thought about this often walking the hallways of New York Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital when on faculty at Cornell, the hospital whose antecedent was founded in 1853 by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the United States. Dr. Blackwell, notably, was inspired to study medicine by a family friend suffering from uterine cancer, who had imagined that she would have been better cared for by a female doctor. Dr. Blackwell’s hospital, the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, was to be staffed exclusively by women, with the explicit goal of opening pathways for women physicians. Years later, she built a medical school to support this purpose.[2]

Fiction has always been my favorite way of learning about history. The novelist Doris Lessing observed that it offers a way into understanding the feeling of a historical time and place, and it is fiction that most helps me imagine what it must have been like working as a woman physician when they were so scarce. I found myself drawn recently to two novels with this theme. 

The first, Lady Tan's Circle of Women, was given to me by a dear college friend in my own circle of women. It is based on the physician Tan Yunxian, who practiced traditional medicine during the Ming dynasty in 15th century China. I recognize her as a thoughtful physician-scientist, keeping detailed records of her patients' symptoms, treatments, and outcomes. (The novel was inspired by her real manuscript, Sayings of a Female Doctor.) Lady Tan navigates formidable power structures, including a mother-in-law who wants her to live as a traditional wife, male doctors’ intrinsic authority, and the brutal custom of foot binding, and she does it all with the support of a circle of women, including her best friend Meiling, a midwife from a different social stratum, and her stepmother.

The second, Libertie, is about a Black woman physician, Dr. Cathy Sampson, practicing in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Weeksville in the 19th century. The novel is inspired by the life of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, one of the first African American women to receive a medical degree in the United States and the first in New York State. Weeksville was a center for Black family, religious, and political life, and a stop on the Underground Railroad. The story is told from the point of view of Dr. Sampson's daughter, Libertie, who watches her mother help escaped slaves arrive hidden in coffins, reviving them with herbal remedies before helping them to safety. Throughout the novel, Dr. Sampson navigates racism, skepticism from patients about her gender, and compromise, ultimately founding an integrated hospital aimed at serving poor African American patients, at a time when such an institution was almost unimaginable.

What strikes me most reading these two books together is how much connects these women across centuries and continents to the practice of medicine by me and my colleagues today. Both were meticulous observers who learned from their patients. Both understood that being a woman could be a clinical advantage. Lady Tan could physically examine her patients in ways that male physicians, constrained by modesty customs, simply could not. In dermatology, where so much depends on looking and listening closely, that kind of intimate access still matters. Both women faced the same paradox: the very identity that gave them unique insight into their patients' conditions was also the identity that made society, colleagues, and even patients sometimes resist them.

In honor of Women's History Month, I think of and thank my mom and my aunts, Tan Yunxian, Dr. Blackwell, Dr. McKinney-Steward, and all the women physicians I have had the honor of learning from and training alongside. Today, we as women physicians are walking the corridors that they and others have opened up to us.

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[1] Of note, as WDS member Noëlle Sherber points out, the first medical school class at Hopkins in 1893 admitted three women because the trustees’ daughters raised money needed for the school to open on the condition that qualified women who met the same standards as men be considered.  See:  https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history/women-med-ed

[2] For more on Dr. Blackwell and her contemporaries, WDS member Sara Hylwa recommends Olivia Cambell’s “Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine” (Park Row, 2021).