December 7, 2007
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Women have always been healers, yet when medicine became a formal profession in Europe and America, women were shut out from participating. Now, UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) celebrates America’s women physicians in a new traveling exhibit at the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences.
The exhibit, Changing the Face of Medicine, features photos and profiles of some of the pioneering women in health care, from Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn an M.D. degree in 1849, to Bernadine Healy, the first woman to direct the National Institutes of Health.
It opens at the museum, part of UAB’s Historical Collections, on Dec. 14 and runs through Feb. 15. The museum is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., on the third floor of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, 1700 University Blvd.
“Women waged a long, difficult battle to gain access to medical education and hospital training,” said Stefanie Rookis, curator of the museum. “Since then, women have had to overcome prejudices and discrimination to succeed in every area of the profession.”
Hughes Evans, M.D., senior associate dean for academic affairs at the UAB School of Medicine, will deliver ‘The Lady Doctor’: Thoughts on How Femininity and Feminism have Changed Medicine., a Reynolds Historical Lecture as part of an opening reception for the exhibit at 3 p.m. on Dec. 14.
Additional events associated with the exhibit include a Jan. 9 lecture by Diann Jordan, Ph.D., of Alabama State University, speaking on Sisters in Science: Conversations with Black Women Scientists on Race, Gender and the Passion for Science.
A film and scholarly panel discussion about the role of women in medicine will be held on Jan. 3 at 3 p.m.., sponsored by the UAB Chapter of the American Medical Women’s Association.
An exhibition website runs in conjunction to the traveling exhibit. The website features biographies of more than 330 women who have practiced medicine in the past 150 years. Visitors can browse through hundreds of photographs, search a physician database, watch a series of short films and even review resources for planning a career in medicine. The website is at www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine.
Changing the Face of Medicine was developed by the Exhibition Program of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine in collaboration with the American Library Association Public Programs Office. Additional support comes from the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health and the American Medical Women’s Association.