Ocean State Libraries

Presents biographical sketches highlighting the contributions of women, mostly American, to the field of medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Examines the lives of Barbara McClintock, Maria Mayer, Rosalyn Yalow, and Rita Levi-Montalcini, women scientists who won the Nobel Prize against extraordinary odds, in different fields and under different circumstances.

" ... Presents the stories of seventeen women of science working in seven countries over a timespan of more than three centuries. From a scandalous French noblewoman who introduced Newton's ideas to France to the African American granddaughter of slaves who pioneered the field of chemotherapy, from a mathematical prodigy who retired from the world to practice charity to the daughter of a Nobel laureate determined to follow in her mother's footsteps,...