Women in Medicine 1942 Romanian License Authorizing a Woman to Practice Medicine

Royal Medical College of Romania Women’s Labor Employment

Manuscripts & Autographs

Royal Medical College of Romania. 1942 license to practice medicine issued to a woman, documenting the formal admission of a female physician to professional medical practice in wartime Romania. The license records the institutional process by which medical credentials were recognized and permission to practice was conferred, placing an individual woman within Romania’s developing twentieth-century medical profession. Romanian women had entered medical education before the First World War, but female physicians remained a minority within the country’s medical establishment during the interwar period. Royal Medical College of Romania. License to Practice Medicine. Romania, 1942. The document formally licenses a woman to practice medicine. Its date places the authorization during the Second World War, when Romania was governed by the Antonescu regime and participating in the war alongside the Axis powers. The license provides direct evidence of a woman receiving professional medical authorization within this wartime institutional setting. Women’s entry into Romanian medicine had expanded after the First World War: women increasingly studied medicine and obtained positions in hospitals, maternity facilities, schools, and other public-health institutions, although men continued to predominate in medical administration and practice. The 1942 license records the continuation of that professional development into the wartime period. The history was not confined to Romania; historian Mary Roth Walsh documented a comparable early twentieth-century contraction in women’s participation in American medicine, where women’s share of the physician workforce declined substantially after 1900. This Romanian license supplies a specific documentary record of female medical practice during the same period of uneven access to the profession internationally.

Item #15474

Price: $135.00