Publisher's Synopsis
This is the autobiography of a distinguished Michigan native who helped to establish a place for women in medicine. Bertha Van Hoosen was born in 1863 to a Dutch Canadian father and a third-generation Michigan mother on a farm near the small town of Rochester. The first chapters of Petticoat Surgeon are full of insights into educational opportunities and farm life in late nineteenth-century Michigan. After college and medical school at the University of Michigan, Van Hoosen spent the early part of her career at the Women's Hospital in Detroit, the Kalamazoo State Hospital, and the New England Hospital for Women and Children, ultimately settling in Chicago to develop her practice in obstetrics and gynecology. Committed to teaching medicine and to delivering medical service to the poor, Van Hoosen taught anatomy and embryology at the Northwestern University Women's Medical School and worked at the Columbia Dispensary. She eventually becam
