The Complex Life of a Woman Doctor

Medicine and Motherhood

Dr. Gloria Schrager has written a revealing memoir about her struggle to become a doctor at a time when women physicians were an anomaly. The era she has lived through has been incredibly eventful: she relates how the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Unamerican Activities Committee, the overt bias and harassment that women in the professions had to face, all impacted on her life. But the memoir has a lighter side, recounting some of the adventures and mishaps of medical school, internship, maintaining a successful marriage and raising a family while engaged in the full-time practice of medicine. Both of her sons as well as a niece and grandniece have become physicians, and the book describes some the differences, both good and bad, between the practice of medicine today and how it was practiced over fifty years ago.