Olivia Campbell: Women in White Coats-How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine

WOMEN IN WHITE COATS:
HOW THE FIRST WOMEN DOCTORS
CHANGED THE WORLD OF MEDICINE
Olivia Campbell
HarperCollins / Park Row Books, March 2, 2021, $27.99
ISBN 10: 0778389391; ISBN 13: 978-0778389392

Campbell reports:

Women in White Coats is about three of the first women to earn medical degrees: unlikely friends who banded together to establish a women’s medical school in London. Sexist roadblocks met them at every turn. Still, they chose not only to pursue their goals, but also to ensure those who came after them could do the same. Their work proved pivotal in opening the medical profession to women and elevating the quality of women’s healthcare.

I got the idea after reading about two riots, one in Philadelphia and one in Edinburgh, where male medical students threw violent temper tantrums because women dared to join them in the classroom. I decided to dig further into accounts of the sexism Victorian women endured while attempting to enter the field of medicine.

I wrote the proposal with my agent’s help. She’d reached out to me after reading one of my essays and asked if I had any book ideas. The first submission round received universal feedback: great idea, narrow the focus. After a major overhaul, I sold it to Park Row Books, a HarperCollins imprint.

My editor expected to see a chunk of chapters every few months to ensure my story was on the right track. These extra deadlines helped me develop a rhythm of writing a chapter a month.

My book advance funded research trips to New York, London, and Edinburgh. I loved digging through archives and reading letters penned by the women I was writing about. These trips happened late in my writing process. By that point I knew what information I was missing, what I hadn’t been able to find in books, academic papers, or digitized archival documents.

My advice to aspiring authors is to be sure to find a topic you can dedicate several years of your life to without tiring of it. Don’t get bogged down in research; writing a book requires a lot of reading, but you can’t read everything that’s ever been written about your subject. Do keep meticulous notes about your source material and either hire a fact checker or set aside time to do it yourself.

Contact info:

• Olivia Campbell, 804-928-5520, liviebug26@gmail.com; ocampbell.writer@gmail.com, https://www.ocampbellwriter.com/, @liviecampbell
• Book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/women-in-white-coats-olivia-campbell
• Publicist: Roxanne Jones, 212-207-6937, Roxanne.Jones@harpercollins.com
• Agent: Zoe Sandler, 212-556-6699, zoe.sandler@icmpartners.com

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