Tannenbaum demonstrates the various medical roles women have played, as mothers and wives caring for members of their households, as midwives and women who attended births, as shamans and healers, as doctoresses and physician's helpers, as nurses, and eventually, after gaining admittance to medical colleges, as doctors. She draws on a wealth of sources to illustrate the changing role of women in the medical arena during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.