Women in Medicine
America has produced many doctors and nurses who became heroes or made revolutionary inventions. Women have been a key part of achievements and advancements in U.S. history when it came to medicine but they were unfortunately not given the same recognition or opportunities whatsoever.
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Florence Gaynor
Florence Small Gaynor was born in the early thirties dreaming of becoming a nurse. When she applied to a nursing school and was rejected due to her race and gender, she went back to school to study chemistry and looked for a nursing college that would admit her. She worked at Queen's general hospital, where she was appointed head nurse. She was later able to get her Master's degree thanks to title IX. Gaynor studied in Nordic countries to better understand Scandinavian health systems and served on multiple medical boards. Her revolutionary research on Scandinavian municipal systems made her position as the executive director even more significant (Randy 1993). Along with being the first black woman and among the first women to direct a hospital, she changed the way American hospitals are set up. Pictured is her obituary from the New York Times. While her achievement as the first Black woman to become a Hospital Chief is commemorated in a lengthy article, her achievements in medicine are hardly described. Her notes and personal belongings revealed that she got hundreds of letters from fellow female and African American medical professionals and government officials congratulating her (Duke 2017). She is however rarely included in sources talking about significant achievements in medicine.
