Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Séances, 1850-1930 (original) (raw)

“From Practice to Print: Women Crafting Authority at the Margins of Orthodox Medicine"

This article analyzes how a category of women possessing medical secrets known as "femmes à secrets" entered commercial medicine in mid-to late-XVIII th-century Paris. It reads sources including remedy patents and printed publicity with a view to exploring women's agency in producing and peddling medical products and services within the burgeoning marketplace. It shows how this form of "fringe" practice provided a unique forum where women cultivated their authority outside of learned medicine while also interacting with it. In doing so, the article displaces traditional narratives which position charlatans and quacks as the primary practitioners who colonized the margins of medical practice. Instead, it provides an account of women as examples of the dynamic "fringe" practitioners who strove to prove their genuine authority across a variety of domains. By bringing their practice to print, enterprising women succeeding in staking out their claim to expertise in a growing and increasingly consumerist, legislated, and policed medical milieu, where the boundaries between "expert" and "amateur" knowledge traditions were becoming increasingly blurred. Cet article analyse le développement d'une tradition de détentrices de remèdes dites « femmes à secrets » au sein du commerce médical dans le Paris des Lumières. À l'aide de brevets officinaux et de la publicité imprimée, il retrace le rôle des femmes dans le florissant marché médical, où elles ont inventé et vendu une variété de produits et de services. Cet aspect marginal de la pratique médicale a en effet fournit aux femmes un important forum où elles ont cultivé leur autorité en marge et en dialogue avec la médecine traditionnelle. L'article remet en question l'histoire des « marges » médicales dans lesquelles les praticiens frauduleux se sont inscrits comme acteurs principaux. Il offre plutôt l'histoire d'une médicine « marginale » dynamique et animée par des femmes qui n'ont cessé de faire leurs preuves dans divers domaines. Entre la pratique et la publicité médicale, ces femmes se sont d'abord présentées en tant qu'expertes dans un milieu médical de plus en plus consumériste, réglementé et policé, où la limite entre l'expert et l'amateur médical était à peine évidente.

Between Spiritualism and Hysteria: Science and Victorian Mediumship in Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen

Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 2005

The aim of this article is to propose a reading of Michèle Roberts' neo-Victorian novel, In the Red Kitchen (1990), in the light of recent work on the relationship between mainstream science -for example, the study of nerve illnesses-and the occult sciences in the second half of the Victorian period. This novel examines the connections between hysteria and spiritualism, as well as challenges and demystifies the scientific discourse of early psychology, thus proposing a "hysterical" narrative. Lastly, it will be argued that Roberts' novel is part of a recent trend that can be found in neo-Victorian fiction in which nineteenthcentury science and the occult interrelate.

“Strange women teaching stranger things”: mediumship and female agency in nineteenth- century american spiritualist poetry

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 2019

This article explores the paradoxes posed by American spiritualist poetry in relation to the female voice within nineteenth-century culture. Due to the associations between the passive and sensitive feminine ideal, as well as women's supposedly innate moral and spiritual superiority, the ideology embraced by the spiritualist community granted its female followers a central role in the emerging movement while remaining compliant with the values of the period. As an example, spiritualist authors Lizzie Doten and Achsa Sprague made use of trance poetry to challenge the stereotypes which were meant to prevent women from participating in public life. By tracing the connections between mediumship and the act of writing it is possible to disclose the diverse strategies that such poets borrowed from spiritualist discourse in order to adapt their work to a readership that would rather believe in ghosts than in self-sufficient female authorship. RESUMEN Este artículo explora las paradojas planteadas por la poesía espiritista americana en relación con la voz femenina en la cultura decimonónica. Debido a las asociaciones entre el ideal de femineidad pasivo y sensible, además de la superioridad moral y espiritual supuestamente innata de las mujeres, la ideología adoptada por la comunidad espiritista otorgaba a sus seguidoras un papel central en el movimiento emergente mientras, al mismo tiempo, permanecía de acuerdo con los valores de la época. Por ejemplo, las autoras

Feminization of Canadian Medicine: Voices from the Second Wave

In 2009 a Globe and Mail pundit claimed that the current doctor shortage stems from increasing numbers of women in medicine. This opinion is widely held, despite articulate opposition from medical deans who characterized it as a new variant of the old " sexist blame game " (CMAJ 2008). In this ambivalent climate, we interviewed 10 women who entered the Canadian profession between 1945 and 1960, when strict limits on female students were established in most schools. Using semi-structured, in-person and telephone interviews, we found that they worked as much as their male colleagues. Several also raised three to five children; and negotiation of the domestic sphere usually fell to them. Most worked past age 65, and two are still working well into their eighties. Our findings will be set in the context of the existing literature on women in medicine. We will also examine the results of surveys on physicians' working hours, in which all specialties show a decline, including those that have not been feminized. We conclude that the women who entered the profession between 1945 and 1960 did not contribute to the current doctor shortage. Résumé. En 2009, une journaliste au Globe and Mail a suggéré que la pénurie actuelle de médecins au Canada a ses origines dans la féminisation croissante du corps médical. Cet avis est partagé par beaucoup de gens bien qu'il soit contesté par une opposition savante et bien articulée le présentant comme une nouvelle manifestation du sexisme traditionnel. Dans ce contexte d'ambiva-lence, nous avons interrogé dix femmes entrées dans la profession entre 1945 et 1960, période pendant laquelle des limites strictes entravaient l'admission des étudiantes féminines. Lors d'entrevues tenues en personne ou par téléphone,

Between the Sciences: Psychosomatic Medicine as a Feminist Discipline

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2017

Psychosomatic medicine was an interdisciplinary medical field established in the late 1930s in response to growing dissatisfaction with the Cartesianism assumed in both general medicine and psychiatry. Seeking a method that could address the many health conditions that fell outside the scope of any particular specialisation, advocates of this movement were doctors, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who insisted on treating the organism as a whole. Among these was Helen Flanders Dunbar, an enigmatic psychiatrist and philosopher, who insisted that the success of medicine rested on its ability to apprehend the interrelationality of mind and body as an object in its own right. This article shows that Dunbar’s ambition to develop a practice of medicine that would more faithfully address the organism as whole, rather than fragment, evokes the larger issue of how we can know and study life objectively. Drawing on the works of feminist STS scholars Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, I show that Dunbar grappled with the situatedness of knowledge practices – and specifically, the relationship between object and method – as a central concern of her discipline. I argue that psychosomatic medicine is an example of feminist thought as science because its very practice relies on holding alive questions about the nature of objectivity, truth and the ontological entanglement of ‘what’ and ‘how’ we know.

Charlatan Quacks and Good Women: Female Practitioners in the Early Modern Medical Marketplace

The vast majority of people in early modern England received their medical care either in the home or from practitioners with no formal education or qualifications. In the effort to formalize the practice of medicine into a well regulated and highly regarded profession in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the medical establishment launched sustained attacks against these irregular practitioners designed to discredit their skills in the minds of the people using their services. This was not a straightforward task in the complex and diffuse medical marketplace of the period, and overlap between home care and that provided by irregular practitioners complicated the task of vilifying female practitioners in particular. Those on the side of an increasingly corporate professionalization of the industry, the College of Physicians and their supporters, strove to make a clear distinction between charlatan quacks who charged clients for medical care and good woman who dispensed care out of Christian charity. It is my contention that the establishment’s efforts were hampered by the lived experience of the average person, as well as the positive impression of feminine care left on every child raised by a loving mother. I find evidence of the inconsistency of attitudes toward female practitioners in two plays of the period, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hoxton, and Frances Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Both plays exploit the negative stereotypes surrounding women health care providers, the first a con artist wise woman the second a meddling housewife. But both also ultimately betray a fundamental belief in the reliability and efficaciousness of medical care provided by women.