stuffmomnevertoldyou: The Crossdressing Doctor Who Performed the First Successful Cesarean Section I

stuffmomnevertoldyou:

The Crossdressing Doctor Who Performed the First Successful Cesarean Section

In the mid-18th century, when Prussian Dorothea Erxleben-Leporin became the first female doctor in modern history, the medical profession was strictly off-limits to women because people thought it would be downright dangerous to their health.

The intensive thinking and intellectualizing required would certainly send members of the fairer sex into hysteria and drain their fertility, so the pre-Enlightenment sexist rationale went; not to mention women lacked the physical strength to wield such impossibly imposing tools as handheld obstetrical forceps. Around 50 years after Erxleben-Leporin successfully petitioned the King of Prussia to grant her admission into medical school, Miranda Stuart was born in 1795. Stuart also wanted to become a doctor, but she took a shortcut around medical schools’ no-women-allowed policies and began living as a man when she was 18.