title: Women: medicine, their kidneys, and nephrology.
abstract: As an act of compassion, the art of caring for the sick has always depended on women. As a practical tradition of healing skills, the "wise" and "old" women of antiquity were the original founders of what would ultimately become medicine. Throughout the subsequent millennia that it took for the gradual transformation of the healing skills from a craft to a profession, women continued to contribute to its progress and development. Unfortunately, recorded history has marginalized much of their fundamental contributions because most extant and investigated medical texts of the past were authored by men. As medicine began to embrace the basic sciences and became a university-based and regulated profession, rules excluding women from entry into the profession were made stricter and more rigorously enforced. It is only in the latter half of the 19th century that, in the footsteps of the growing feminine movement, women were admitted to medical schools, and in the 20th century that they began to contribute in earnest to the science of medicine. This article recounts this progress and highlights how it affected our knowledge of kidney disease in women and the enlarging role of women in the relatively new discipline of nephrology.
authors: Renal Section, Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030, USA. geknoyan@bcm.edu
authors: Garabed
authors: G
authors: Eknoyan
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D029001:Herbal Medicine / Q000266:history; D049668:History, 15th Century; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D049690:History, Ancient; D049691:History, Medieval; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009398:Nephrology / Q000266:history*; D009774:Obstetrics / Q000266:history*; D010822:Physicians, Women / Q000266:history*
keywords: Gender and CKD; Herbals; Kidney disease in women; Women in medicine; Women in nephrology