The Medicine Woman of Galveston is the story of a female physician, Tucia Hatherley, at the turn of the 20th century. After her mother dies when she is twelve and her father remarries, she develops severe anxiety and copes with it with trichtillomania—pulling out her own hair to the point of baldness. She has always wanted to be a physician, and her sawmill-owning father permits it. She completes her schooling, but during her internship, she suffers harassment from her peers and from professors. After a forced sexual encounter followed by an unfortunate experience in the operating room, she gives up her profession. With a disabled son and heavily in debt, when a medicine show emcee offers her a job hoping to use her medical degree to lend legitimacy to his snake oil cures, she takes it—only to find it is more than she bargained for.
Skenandore does a great job depicting Tucia’s PTSD and anxiety disorders as well as the problems of her Down syndrome son. The character she works with in the medicine show form an unusual aggregate but provide a sense of family. If readers think her journey through medical school is exaggerated, as a physician myself, I can attest that it is not, having suffered similar hazing from male physicians and peers, well into the 21st century. The depictions of Galveston during and after the great hurricane of 1900 were historically accurate. An enjoyable fast-paced book.
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The Medicine Woman of Galveston (Kensington, May 21, 2024) is available through:
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