You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Ben Franklin's world is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

Ironically, men of science relied on women's grassroots knowledge.

European government sent them to the Americas to

bioprospect for pharmaceuticals, even as these men simultaneously

dismissed women's knowledge in their writings. Hello and welcome to episode 39 of Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past

have shaped the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Kofart.

Women make up a majority of health care workers

in the United States, where they represent 8 and 10 health care workers.

Whereas within the overall workforce of the United States, which represents all jobs in the workforce,

women consist of just about 50% of workers.

Yet when we look at the jobs that women perform in health care,

they still lag behind men when it comes to fulfilling the roles of medical doctors and surgeons.

Susan Brant, a historian and lecturer. of Medical Doctors and Surgeons.

Susan Brant, a historian and lecturer at the University of Colorado,

Colorado Springs, seeks to better understand why women make up a majority of workers

in the health care fields, but a minority of medical doctors and

surgeons.

So she joins us to investigate the very rich history of women healers in the early American

period, with details from her book, Women Healers, Gender Authority in Medicine, in early Philadelphia.

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