It has often been said that behind every great man there is a woman, and history confirms that men have been the achievers, women the inspirers. Here are stories of some of these little publicized but unforgettable women, all different, yet all share a fundamental truth: our would would be quite different were it not for these women whose aid, comfort, and courage gave vital support and inspiration to the towering giants of the medical world.

There was Troctula di Rugegiero who, in an age when women were thought to belong only in the home, fearlessly advanced her ailing husband's work in the laboratory and classroom. Sara Woodson willingly shared hardship and peril as the first doctor's wife in the New World. Mary Moffatt Livingston went with her missionary-doctor husband into the wilds of Africa.

Not all were wives -- there was the Japanese mother who offered herself as a human guinea pig for her son's vital experiment; the three Negro women slaves who trusted their lives to the pioneering work of a great surgeon; the uneducated farm woman who believed one doctor's word against the narrow-minded society -- and many more.

The author makes history come alive as she traces the progress and the endless drama of medicine from the early middle ages to the twentieth century.

From the dust jacket