Women doctors

1.                  My subject will be 19^th Century Women Doctors in the West.  It is my intent to highlight the forward looking practice of medicine, focusing on the practitioners, as communities grew in the western, particularly intermountain, area of our country. The information contained on this page will be less technical and more anecdotal.  There will be biography and autobiography, some statistics.   

 

2.   Even today medicine in the west of the United States is considered backward in comparison to its Eastern counterpart.  The reality is that 19^th century pioneers in the west  took medical knowledge with them and community leaders were well aware of the need to remain in touch with the larger picture.  Women composed a greater segment of medical professionals in this time than we would suppose and their voices are present and need a conduit to the limelight.

 

3.  The site will provide a home page with title, short introduction, navigation bar, subject buttons and photo of women doctors.  Each subject button will lead to a page

1. Title: 19^th Century Women Doctors in the West
2. Introduction: (not written yet)

c.   Subject buttons: 

Geography

The practitioners

Implements and purposes

Patients and diseases

     d.    Photo

e.        Navigation bar:

Search

Contact Us

About Us

Links to related sites

Bulletin Board

4.  My target audience is medical historians, feminist historians, genealogists, hobby historians, descendants of the people mentioned, and perhaps high school teachers and college professors as well.  It’s a relatively small audience, but an intensely interested one.  

 

1. I intend to preserve a rather book-like, antiquarian feel for this home page to assist the reader/web surfer in jumping 150 years into the past.  A covered wagon photo or realistic drawing with turning wheels and people walking along beside it, and a woman with her doctor bag on horseback in front or behind will be under the title.  Maybe this animation should just be the medicine woman.

A webpage with subject buttons positioned beneath the navigation bar linking the home page to the subject pages.  This page is meant to capture attention, keep it with narrative information and then provide ways for the interested reader to continue in research and therefore the technology will remain simple. 

 

6.  The home page will only show the “contact us” button as a way for users to communicate.  On that page there will be a field for comments and a sentence or two encouraging those with pertinent material to confer with the webmaster for uploading.