Women and Psychiatry

In this article, we review the history of women in health care from several thousand years BC through the present day. Although women practiced medicine as early as 4000. BC, European medical education did not begin until the ninth century. We analyze the trajectory of women's roles in medicine, throughout the middle ages until the present time, culminating in a focus on women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and European Medicine. We conclude by focusing specifically on the roles of women in psychiatry and the challenges which continue to be experienced by women in leadership in Western medicine in the twenty-first century.