Our panel will examine the work of female medical practitioners and their vital role in attending to patients in an otherwise male-dominated space. By focusing on either individual practitioners, like Susan McKinney Steward, an African American homeopathic practitioner, or a group of women, such as nurses in the Dubuque community in 1918 and feminist activists in the Emma Goldman Clinic in the late-20^th century, we hope to highlight their work and influence in critical moments of history. Their presence challenged national trends of medical professionalization, which increasingly defined and restricted who could practice medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such efforts largely pushed women out of the medical sphere in spite of their own expertise and qualifications. While medical regulation sought to homogenize the practice of medicine, it also operated alongside larger racial and gendered endeavors to prioritize white male physicians over other practitioners under the guise of “impartial” scientific medical practice. Communities of color, low-income families, and female patients all suffered under these shifts as allopathic physicians visualized their own ideal patient population that did not account for accessibility in providing care or variability in working with different types of patients with variable needs. Our papers highlight the work of women who pushed back against these shifts and were vital in meeting the needs of patients and treating illness.