The Woman in the Surgeon's Body

Harvard University Press

21$.95, pp 267

ISBN 0 674 95467 X

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“Anybody but the girl! Give me a trained monkey—I'drather have anybody but the girl!” So raged a male senior surgeon intheatres when scheduled to have a female trainee assisting him. Thisis just one episode illustrating this riveting study on women surgeons in the United States. “What's an anthropologist doingstudying surgeons?” the author was asked while conducting a study on21male surgeons; she replied (perhaps jokingly), “Well, there were no other primitives left.” She now turns her attention to women surgeons, and clearly the term primitives was not a misrepresentationof many of their male colleagues.

The author studied 33 women surgeons of differing ages practising in eastern andmid-western United States. There was a wide representation of career stages and surgical …