Women make up roughly 75 percent of Canada’s health-care workforce, according to a 2023 analysis in The Conversation. And yet, when the health-care system falters, the burden does not fall equally.

The same analysis highlights that women in Canada perform significantly more unpaid care work than men when formal systems fall short. 

Every year on Women’s Day, we celebrate progress. But if we are honest, medicine and healthcare as we know it exist because women refused exclusion, invisibility, and limitation.

Here are ten women who reshaped healthcare forever.

1. Florence Nightingale

This name is foundational to any history of modern healthcare. Remembered as “the Lady with the Lamp,” Florence Nightingale transformed nursing during the Crimean War. But her real revolution was data. She used statistical analysis to prove that sanitation reduced mortality, laying the foundation for evidence-based healthcare. Modern infection control protocols trace their roots back to her insistence that data should guide care.

2. Elizabeth Blackwell

Elizabeth Blackwell is the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, in 1849. Medical schools had rejected her repeatedly. Her acceptance was reportedly meant as a joke vote by male students.

She graduated anyway and opened the door for women physicians worldwide.

3. Rebecca Lee Crumpler

Dr Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first African American woman in the United States to earn a medical degree in 1864. She focused her work on women and children in underserved communities.

Her career represents something we still discuss today: healthcare access as justice.

4. Marie Curie

Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity changed medicine forever. Radiation therapy and diagnostic imaging stem from her work. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.

5. Virginia Apgar

The Apgar Score, developed by Dr Virginia Apgar in 1952, transformed neonatal care. In under a minute, physicians could assess a newborn’s health using a standardized system. It reduced infant mortality and remains universally used in delivery rooms worldwide.

6. Jane Cooke Wright

A pioneer in cancer chemotherapy research, Dr Jane Cooke Wright helped develop techniques that made chemotherapy more targeted and effective. She was also one of the first Black women to lead major cancer research initiatives, long before diversity was a strategic priority in medicine.

7. Gerty Cori

Dr Gerty Cori became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on carbohydrate metabolism. Her research clarified how the human body converts glycogen into energy: a fundamental knowledge still taught in medical school.

8. Helen Brooke Taussig

Dr Helen Brooke Taussig, also known as founder of pediatric cardiology, co-developed the surgical procedure that saved children born with “blue baby syndrome” in 1944. She also became the first woman to be made a full professor at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1959 and became the first woman president of the American Heart Association in 1965.

9. Dr Özlem Türeci

Co-founder of BioNTech, Dr Özlem Türeci helped lead the development of one of the first widely distributed mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. During a global crisis, her work helped save millions of lives.

10. Dr Maude Abbott

Dr Maude Abbott transformed the study of congenital heart disease. Despite being denied admission to medical school in Canada because of her gender, she built an international reputation in pathology and cardiology.

She was one of the first women to obtain a bachelor’s degree in arts from McGill University. In 1894, she received her medical degree from Bishop’s College, where she earned the Senior Prize in anatomy and the Chancellor’s Prize for the best examination in the final sessions.

Women have changed medicine forever by building systems that outlived them.

If you are working in healthcare today, especially in nursing or clinical research, you are part of that next chapter.

This Women’s Day, we celebrate the pioneers. But we also recognize the present.