Olivia Campbell, WOMEN IN WHITE COATS: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine

[1:37]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, moms don't have time to read books. I'm also the host of moms don't have time to lose weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to: A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Olivia Campbell is the author of Women in How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine. Olivia started writing as a young girl, mysteries fashioned after her beloved Nancy Drew. As a teen, her passion for ballet saw her train to become a professional dancer. A broken foot prompted her to pivot to arts journalism. In college, an unplanned pregnancy, complicated birth, and postpartum depression turned her writing interest from the arts to medicine. Now she's an independent journalist, essayist, and author focusing on the intersections of medicine, women, history, and nature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Cut, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Self, Aeon, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, LitHub, Good Housekeeping, Catapult, Parents, and Undark among others. Women in White Coats is her first book. She also holds a master's degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University and an undergraduate degree in journalism from Virginia Commonwealth University and is a member of the National Association of Science Writers. She currently lives in the Philadelphia suburbs along with her husband, three sons, and Cat. Welcome, Olivia. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss women in white coats. Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure. Would you mind telling listeners what your book is about? And also what inspired you to write it? So my book is about three women in the Victorian era who,

[3:35]Olivia Campbell: against all odds, decide to become doctors, fight as hard as they can to become the first MDs in The US practicing in The UK and in Scotland. So it's three women across different continents. And they're very unlikely friends, right? They don't get along very well. But because of what they've done and how they achieved it, because they're first, they have to band together, work together, they have to figure out how to work together to establish a women's medical school in London, the first women's medical school in England, the only place women can get a medical degree in England. So they really they didn't want anyone else, any other women to go through what they went through to get their medical degree, the harassment they suffered, struggles they went through. So it would have been really easy for them to just, you know, stop after they got their degrees, right? No one would have blamed them at all. It was so much work and so hard for them to get to that point, years and years and years. And even one of them, you know, she did all the work for a degree, they didn't actually award her the degree, she had to keep going. But they didn't stop there after their degrees. They didn't rest and just practice medicine. They said, you know what? I'm going to make sure that no one else has to go through what I went through. And they found these schools. They found a school. One of them found a school in New York, and then all three of them together found a school in London. So what inspired me to to start writing about this women in this era is I read about a riot in Philadelphia that happened in 1869, and it was where women appeared in a medical school class in a clinical lecture is what it was at a hospital. So they had been going along at their women's medical school in Philadelphia, and they said, you know what? We we need clinical education. We we gotta apply to get into this hospital lecture. We we need to to have this part of our education too, not just the men. Because the men have been going to these lectures for years and years. So they finally the people at the hospital say, okay, you can come. And they appear, and the men knew that they were coming. They had been planning a huge riot. They were passing papers around saying, watch out for the she doctors. They're coming. They're going to take our jobs. They have no business being here. So they get like 300 people, 300 men to appear at this lecture way more than normal. And they they start throwing crap at them. They're throwing tobacco spit, and they're yelling at them and saying calling them nasty names and just horrible things. At the end of it, they they're throwing rocks at them. It was mayhem. It was a full blown riot just because these women wanted to get a medical education. And so I was really intrigued by that. And then I found out that a year later, almost exactly a year later, Edinburgh, Scotland, there was another riot with almost the exact same thing happened. Women were going into this mixed gender exam. So they had taken classes separately, a few classes they had alongside men, but mostly they were taking separate classes for the women at the University of Edinburgh. And so but the exam was for for everyone. They had to mix everyone together for the exam. And same deal. They they were like, had planned ahead to to bring a mob. So they the women arrived to the exam, and there's a mob. They're waiting for them. They're drunk and throwing rotten vegetables. They're throwing mud at them. They're covering the grasses with mud. So I was like, okay. This is this is a pattern. Right? There's two exactly the same. This is there's something going on here. So I I needed to know more. I needed to know everything that these women were going through during this time just to try to get a medical degree.

[7:02]Zibby Owens: Wow. What a story. Why so first of all, why do you think this appealed to you so much personally? Like, I could read those studies and be like, oh, wow. Interesting. And then like flip the page of the newspaper and never think about it again. I mean, not to be so glib, but you dedicated, like, I'm assuming years of your life to researching

[7:21]Olivia Campbell: and writing and, you know, bringing the story to life for the rest of us. Why do you think? When I started digging into these stories, what I found is many of the women in Philadelphia well, first of all, Philadelphia. I live outside of Philadelphia. So I was I was pulled in by that. And actually, Philadelphia didn't end up being a large part of the book that kind of got cut out because we focused in on the people in London. So but that's fine. But so I I was reading about, like, the reasons why these women in Philadelphia wanted to come to the the women's medical school there. And I found all these stories of women who had difficult births, had lost a child in childbirth, had lost a relative in childbirth. Just these really incredible stories. And I felt a great connection with many of these women because I had the reason I started writing about medicine in the first place was a difficult childbirth, getting pregnant unexpectedly, having terrible postpartum depression. So I felt connected to the reasons why they were drawn to medicine. I wasn't drawn to medicine, but I was drawn to writing about health, about women's medicine by those experiences. That that really drove me to to push further into these stories. And what happened with your postpartum depression? What was that like? Can you talk about it? You don't have to. No. I I can talk about it. It's okay. So I got pregnant in my last year of college. I, like, scrambled to finish all my classes. I gave birth two days before graduation. So I managed to finish everything. I did a full load of classes over that summer, summer before my last semester.

[8:48]Zibby Owens: Where were you in college? So Not that it matters. Were you in college in Philadelphia?

[8:53]Olivia Campbell: No. I I went to VCU in Richmond. So I I was still wasn't your family. My family is in in Virginia and other parts of Virginia. So but I did end up marrying the the father. So we're still together fifteen years later, so that's good. So I really having getting pregnant unexpectedly really hit me hard. And I I felt a lot of resentment around that. And I feel like we don't talk about that enough about like we always think we talk about pregnancy in terms of people planning to get pregnant, people wanting to get pregnant, and that there's a level of control there that there isn't always in actuality. So I felt like I wanted to keep the pregnancy that I was old enough that I wanted to go through with it, but still struggled with the idea of being pregnant and not being planned. And you were what, 20? I was 25. So because I took some time off before I went to college. I traveled and stuff, but yeah, and I switched majors like three times. So yeah, I was older. So I was like, okay, I'm old enough. I could do this. But then I had the baby and I was, you know, I lived far away from any family. None of my friends were having babies. I'm very, very isolated, very alone. My husband works a weird job where he's gone most evenings, and he's younger than me. He was like three years younger. So he was also out of his depth there. And I was just a mess. Like, I was angry. I was I didn't know that postpartum depression could be anger. I just thought that's who I was as a mom. Now that's how I thought this, Okay, I guess this is who I am because that, you know, I'm a mom now and this is who I am. But I was just throw things. I would slam things. I was just the resentment just kind of took root inside me and became that anger. And I really tried hard not to take it out on my child ever. Right. But, you know, those ideas of wanting to run your car off the road and those, you know, those things started to to come to me. And I just never wanted to leave the house. I was stuck on the couch and I had a very, very clummy baby. He just cried all the time. He would nurse all the time. It was one of those kind of colicky situations where it was too much. And I didn't really have any support. When I finally told my obstetrician about it, she kind of patted me on the head basically. Was like, oh, you just need a date night with your husband. Just you just you know, you need some time out. And I was like, oh my god. So that didn't help. You're like, I'm about to murder my husband in cold blood. Right. This is my last attempt to, you know, extricate myself from this. But Yes. Exactly. Like, I that's not the problem. That's not it. Like and I I thinking about it now, like, I understand why my husband didn't wanna be around me either. You know? Like, I understand that he wanted to go out, you know, with his drinking buddies because he was young and he, you know, he wanted to blow steam after work. That's totally understandable. But I just it just made everything worse. Right. So I finally kind of realized what was going on. Like, I didn't really know that I had postpartum depression for many months. And so when I finally realized what it was that I it wasn't just sitting and crying, you know, it wasn't just being sad, but it could manifest in other ways. I started to try other things, try exercise and try, you know, really pushing myself to get out of the house and talking about it, writing about it, researching about it, you know, these kinds of things to get me out of my head. But it was a very dark time. Yeah.

[12:15]Zibby Owens: And very lonely. So sorry. It's also so hard to diagnose, I think, not that I'm any sort of expert, but I feel like when you have a baby, like sometimes it just does suck. Do you know what mean? Like some days really are just really hard and difficult. And it's hard to have a baby crying nonstop and not knowing what to do about it. It's stressful and it raises your blood pressure and you like don't know what to do and you feel frantic and no one can help you. So how do you know you're not like having normal responses to a very, you know, destabilizing stimuli, if you will, as opposed to being in a full on postpartum depression? I think it's hard for even the person doing it and the people around you to know.

[12:56]Olivia Campbell: Right. I don't think anyone could have told me. Like, I don't think my mom could have been like, oh, you have depression. Like, I don't think I would have when you're in it, you don't see it. You can't recognize it a lot of times. And like I said, I just thought because it all happened at the same time, that's just who I was now. Like, this is it. Like, that's that's who I am. I'm just angry Yeah. Of rage. You know? Great. But, yes, they talk about, like, the baby blues or, you know, am I just having a bad day? Is this just what being a parent is like? It's it's you don't know when it's your first kid. And, you know, you feel young and isolated at the same time, and you don't know who to ask. Because all your friends are out having fun that no one else has kids. You don't, you know. But yeah, it's it's having I've had three kids now. I took a very long time after the first kid to have another kid because I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to go through that again. But having experienced postpartum with other two other kids now, I could definitely look back and see how different that was and how, you know, that definitely was not normal.

[13:56]Zibby Owens: Wow. Yeah. I'm surprised to hear you had more kids after that. No. I mean, although, of course, those feelings are very norm you know, they're calm not to minimize, but, you know, there's nothing wrong with those feelings. You know? Like, that's totally understandable that you would feel like that particularly being so young, chemical stuff aside.

[14:17]Olivia Campbell: Yeah. The I think the biggest reason I put off was that I almost died during the childbirth. That didn't help What? Either. So there was like The first one? I waited like four years because I was terrified to like give birth again. Wait. So what do you mean you almost died? Sorry. Now we're not even talking about the book. But this is so interesting to me. I mean, you're not to say like, oh, your pain is my morning interest. No. This is why you're right about women's health and women in medicine. This is why I I dig up and, you know, examine all these elements. So I actually wrote an essay about this. Went back to the hospital many years later and requested my file so I could actually figure out what happened during the childbirth because no one was telling me anything while it was happening. I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was that like I was passing out, things were going black, and my mom was terrified. My mom is a nurse, so you know when she's terrified, it's bad. So the childbirth wasn't going fast enough for them. So they gave me the pitocin, the speeding up the contractions, making the contractions worse thing. So then my contractions hurt so much that I couldn't like walk around as much as I had been. So I'm like in the bed, stuck in the bed. So then it's like even slower labor. So let's see, at some point I get the epidural. And so the pitocin and the epidural didn't have a good mix with me. So I'm one of those people where if you give me an epidural, my blood pressure drops. There's like some percentage of the population where they can't really take an epidural without an extreme blood pressure drop. So I start getting really dizzy. My blood pressure is sinking. The baby's blood pressure is sinking. At the same time, the pitocin is causing a permanent contraction. So my belly is rock hard and not releasing. So yeah. So all of a sudden I went from having like a doctor and a nurse near me to having like a room full of, you know, all the people start running in, things are beeping. The constant contraction means the baby can't, like the heart rate isn't going, isn't there. And my blood pressure drop means my heart rate isn't there. They're And they tip me backwards. So like try to get blood to go to my head. So that's the last thing I remember. I remember being tipped backward and I look up and there's like a circle of people around me. They're, like, pushing my mom out of the way. My mom is flipping out. A circle is something like this perhaps, just saying at the cover of your books. Just, you know okay. Anyway, keep going. Just just like that. So it's one of those, like, I pass out a lot. Like, I'm known to pass out, but this didn't It felt very different than that. It felt like I was really like Like when you're getting put under for anesthesia, like that's what it felt like. Felt like I was going somewhere else. So I'm getting I'm starting to lose consciousness. I'm going feeling like I'm falling backwards the nothingness. And eventually they stabilize everything and pull us out of it. But yeah, my baby and I almost died. So that definitely didn't help the depression situation either.

[17:06]Zibby Owens: You have the end of the pandemic? Did you have a C section?

[17:09]Olivia Campbell: No. I actually had a vaginal childbirth, but the doctor did. He was very concerned that I would need a C section, but there was a really old nurse who was amazing. She like saved me. She was like, No, this is perfectly normal for a first time. Baby. There's nothing like we don't need to start throwing the word C section around. We're not going to do that. So she kind of saved me from the C section. Not that it's bad to have a C section, but that was even more terrified of that. But So it was like thirty hours of labor or something, and it was a total nightmare.

[17:41]Zibby Owens: Wow. Well, you probably also had PTSD, you know, not just postpartum depression.

[17:46]Olivia Campbell: Right. And I I don't think definitely, we weren't talking about that fifteen years ago. You know, like that wasn't a thing. I didn't even think to call it a traumatic experience until I started excavating these files of what exactly happened. And I was like, know what? One of the drugs they gave me, they're not even allowed to use it on pregnant women anymore. It's like forbidden because of all the side effects it caused. So yeah, so they had to give me like epinephrine to restart my heart. So that was the key for the second birth. So as soon as That's why I was terrified about of getting an epidural with the second birth. It's like it's going to tank my heart rate and I'm going to die. So what I had to tell the doctor was, Okay, if I need to get an epidural during the second birth, you have to be ready with an Epi shot like right then. They did. So I asked for the epidural with the second kid, and they saw my heart rate start to fluctuate. They're like, Okay, we're gonna go. And I didn't even notice that they gave me like, that's how much I needed that shot. Like, usually you would definitely notice that shot of a pepper and pepper, right? But it didn't make any difference. Like I just felt totally normal. So that meant the second birth was fine and it was a very empowering experience. And I had a great doctor and a different doctor who really talked me through and it was great. But yeah.

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[22:17]Zibby Owens: Woah. Okay. So then how so what happened then between all of that and you're writing this book? Like in two minutes or less.

[22:30]Olivia Campbell: Let's see. So I got this actually, for my book, I had an agent come to me. So I wrote this essay about climate change and the fairy tale forest. So I read an article about climate change and how it's gonna change the Black Forest in Germany. And I connected that to the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and wrote this long essay for a literary hub about what culture means in the context of a changing climate. Like, what if Black Forest was different, how would those stories be different? Trying to connect those two threads. And I had multiple ages come to me after that and go, hey, you should write a book. And I was like, Oh, okay. I hadn't even thought about that. So it wasn't my idea. But you had decided to become, like a writer or at least a freelance writer at that point, journalist. Yes. So, yeah, in college, I was a ballet dancer dancer for many, many years.

[23:20]Zibby Owens: All these twists and turns of this story. Okay. Keep going.

[23:23]Olivia Campbell: So, yes, I spent most of my life as a ballet dancer. I went to London. I trained in London. I came back to The US and continued my degree, and then I broke my foot during a move, and I decided that I needed a different career that wasn't so dependent on my body. So, of course, you know, journalism is a great great idea. It's totally stable. So I decided to go into writing about arts journalism. So I wrote about, like, the plays and the dance performances and movies and stuff. And so at the college paper, I was the cultural editor. That was great fun. So it was then when I got pregnant that I started writing about health, women's health, medicine, that kind of thing. So that's what brought me to being a writer. And so because I had a baby as soon as I had a degree, I just started freelancing right away. So I've kind of always been a freelance writer. So it's been ten years of freelance writing before I got interest from an agent before I dared to think about writing a book. So fifteen years, three kids later. The first thing I did with my my book money was daycare for my youngest. So, yeah, it was my agent just said, hey. What what do you wanna write about? So I started poking around and sent for ideas. And she said, oh, that sounds good. Now can you dedicate you know, can you not get bored of that idea for the next two or three years? And I said, okay. Yeah. Sure. I can do this.

[24:49]Zibby Owens: Wow. Okay. So now it all makes sense. I get it. Okay. So then you sold this book idea and you started researching. And then what was like your whole process like in writing this book? And how did you manage it with all the kids and like all the rest of it?

[25:02]Olivia Campbell: So, yeah, first thing I did with the book money sealed up that daycare. I got three full days of daycare a week for my guy. Was two, I think at the time he just turned five. So yes, three, three years for research and writing of the book. So up until then, freelancing with kids running around, it was always like a fight, right? It's always like trying to find time, and it's always taking up those like the family time to do your writing in the evenings or the weekends, you know? But now finally, I got the book deal. I didn't need to be freelancing at the same time. So I had the time and the money to dedicate to just this book. So, you know, it could have taken me longer, but it didn't. So I just bought all the books I could find written by these women, written by relatives of these women. I kind of approached it like a journalist writing a profile is what I think of it as like, know, you're gonna interview the person, you're gonna interview their enemies, you're gonna interview their relatives. And so anything I could find about these people as close to them as I could, and then anything written, you know, further out as a biographer, like those kinds of things. And then once I had everything I could from the digital archives online, from all the books written, anything that's that I could get my hands on, used books, old books, I pull I went to the archives, actual archives. So going into the archives in London and Edinburgh and in New York was kind of like the last thing I did almost because I wanted to know exactly what questions I hadn't been able to answer yet. So there's lots of answers in the books and in the things that they'd written, the essays, the medical publications that these people had made. But then I had found references to a sentence or so to in a letter in a book, in a biography. And I was like, Okay, I need to know the full story in that. So I marked down what letter that was, and I needed to go and look at that actual letter. And I found in London, I found a ton of things about the college itself and like when they offered what courses, about the hospital that they ran there, about like what kind of ailments people had that came into the hospital. So those like records of of annual people coming in. So that those were fascinating to me to those details to be able to include, like, things that people would donate to the hospital. That was what I thought hilarious, like, donating, like, large amounts of jams or something or, like, books for patients to read. I thought that was really cool. So I think my favorite part was going into the archives and actually seeing these letters handwritten by these women touching, you know, something that they had touched. It was really electrifying. It really connected me with them and their stories. And that's I had a little picture of the three of them posted on my wall the whole time I wrote the book, and I just wanted to tell their stories, you know, do them justice. I didn't my main thing about most biographies and just people in history in general that are talked about, they kind of want to make them this like godlike, you know, they're perfect. They never did anything wrong. But I really wanted to make these three-dimensional characters. You know, these are not people aren't perfect. No one is perfect. And I point out a lot of the men in the book, a lot of these historical men that we know their names, they were big anti women doctors so that, you know, I'm debunking their status. But I also didn't want to make the women seem like they're perfect either. The further I went along, the harder that was. Looks like the more I got to know these women, the more I was like, Oh, don't want to say that bad thing about them. So I really I understand those impulses where that comes from of wanting to really like make them sound good. Right. Cause I cared about them, but that doesn't do them justice. It doesn't do the reader justice either to kind of pretend that they were something that they weren't. So I really love to kind of paint those full pictures of especially of Sophia. She's so complicated and she's just such a a character really. Like, she's she's angry and but she's really loving. She's like eloquent and witty, but she's also like just kind of a mess sometimes. Like she's fat and she's brash and she says whatever she wants. And she is a lesbian and she just I just love her to bits because she did not take anything from anyone. Those men were not gonna tell her what to do or what to think. She wasn't gonna take it. Whereas some of the other women, they were like, oh, I don't know. We should we should not step on their toes. We we don't wanna, like, make them angry. We need their support to to do this. And she was like, whatever. We're gonna we're gonna do this. We're gonna plow through and do this. So that's that's what I love about Sofia.

[29:25]Zibby Owens: Wow. Well, you know, you started out by saying these women could have just as easily had left good enough alone. Right? Well, what's that expression? Leaving well enough alone. Like, they didn't have to start these medical school. Like, they didn't have to be pioneers. They didn't have to do this. But I would say likewise with you. Like, you didn't have to pull up their stories and repackage them and turn them into three-dimensional characters who now we all can get to know and thank and be appreciative of. And it's pretty awesome. So I think this whole thing and I'm so sorry for everything you went through with your own body and health and all of it. But way to, like, take that pain and make it into something amazing. So I have so much respect for you. I think that's awesome. And the book is fantastic too. I mean, it's like it reads like a novel, really. I mean, you know, the the details that you put in and the thoughts and feelings and how it all happens, it's, like, riveting to read. And knowing the back story now, I think, just like infuses the whole thing with so much more meaning for me as a reader. So amazing. Thank you. Thank you. So are you gonna work on another book, or what do what do you think? Is is are you one and done, or what's up next?

[30:35]Olivia Campbell: No. I would love to do it all again. I'm already working on my next proposal. So, yeah, I'm planning hopefully the next one will come soon. Yeah. I love everything about writing this and to get paid to do what I love to dig into people and their lives and to tell that story is incredible. It's great.

[30:57]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

[31:01]Olivia Campbell: Agents do read what's out there, so keep having interesting ideas. That's what all the agents told me when they approached me. It was they approached me because of my very original essay idea. That was something like that's very struck them as unexpected, a way to thinking about things. So, yeah, keep keep publishing. If you can, don't get discouraged by noes. There's so many things to learn as a first time author, and one of those is you can still get rejected many times. Like being an author doesn't mean that everyone's going to suddenly publish you. It's not to do with your skill or your talent. It's to do with whether your idea is a fit. And sometimes saying no to your idea is definitely the right thing. And I'm very happy when I look back on the times that people have said no to me. Okay, I know that that wasn't a good story. Knowing the difference between when you should keep going and when that actually isn't not a good story. But yeah, just just keep keep pushing, keep keep publishing. The big takeaway I hope people have from my book is that sexism was never okay. Like, as long as there have been people being sexist, there have been people saying, no, this is not how it's gonna be. This is not how it should be because we love to talk about history like it's that's just how it was. People were racist. People were sexist. But you know what? As long as people have been like that, there have been people that are saying, no, this is not okay. It's never been okay.

[32:28]Zibby Owens: Love it. Wow. Olivia, thank you so much. Thanks for spending the time with me this morning and letting me pry into your medical records and your life. So thanks for that. I hope you have a great day, and thank you again for talking about women in white coats. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. Okay. Have a great day. Bye bye. You too. Bye.

[33:04]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.