Introduction: Medical Women in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (original) (raw)
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The Literary Representation of Women Doctors in the United States, 1860-1920
Literature Compass, 2007
Literary representations of women doctors in the United States between 1860 and 1920-the period in which women first entered the American medical profession-have become the focus of extensive critical study over the past thirty years. Much as the initial rise of American women doctors has recently attracted the attention of historians, so many of the images of women physicians that circulated in the United States during the same period have come to be examined by literary scholars and critics. This ongoing scholarly consideration of literary representations of American women as physicians has evolved along a path that corresponds to important phases in literary studies generally since the 1970s: the emergence of second-wave feminist criticism, a return to historically oriented modes of critical analysis, and the growth of interdisciplinary approaches, among other influential developments. Many such approaches to early imaginative representations of American women doctors have been flawed, however, in their use either of documentary evidence or of analytical paradigms drawn from the history of medicine, the history of science, and related fields. Moreover, critical discussion continues to focus primarily on a small fraction of the number of literary images of women doctors that proliferated in the United States between 1860 and 1920-further illustrating how far this area of inquiry has yet to develop and expand in order to do justice to such a pervasive, conspicuous phenomenon in American literary history.
in Nineteenth-Century American Literature T he call for papers for this special issue on medical women in nineteenth-century American literature asked several questions about the connections between history, thematics, and generic forms. I was not only interested in what scholars thought about how the historical context surrounding nineteenth-century American fiction and non-fiction is reflected in the plot and theme, I was equally as interested in the relationship between that historicized theme and the aesthetic form of the works themselves. Nineteenth-century American literature with medical women characters grapples with transgressive women as authors and as characters. These are women who transgress the boundary between the private and the public, between the female space and the male-dominated one. In other words, nineteenth-century American women authors and women physicians both represent a queer, transgressive, and liminal space between the physical and ideological female-inhabited domestic space and the male-dominated professional space.
Fictional women physicians in the nineteenth century: The struggle for self-identity
The Journal of Medical Humanities, 1996
By the late nineteenth century, there were large numbers of women physicians in the United States. Three Realist novels of the time, Dr. Breen's Practice, by W'dliam Dean Howells, Dr. Zay, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and A Country Doctor, by Sarah Orne Jewett, feature women doctors as protagonists. The issues in these novels mirrored current issues in medicine and society. By contrasting the lives of these fictional women doctors to their historical counterparts, it is seen that, while the novels are good attempts to he truthful treatments of women physicians' struggles, in certain areas they do not accurately address the concerns of women physicians.
The Third Sex': Interpellation of the Woman Physician in Nineteenth-Century Literature
2004
As American women entered the medical profession for the first time, the literature of the late nineteenth century America reflects the debates surrounding women professionals. I will focus on three novels written during this controversial and interesting time. William Dean Howells's Dr. Breen 's Practice (1881) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Dr. Zay (1882) deal with similar subjects, both novels portraying a female doctor and her struggle to decide between marriage and a career. Published in 1884, Sarah Orne Jewett' s A Country Doctor was the third novel seen in three years with a female doctor as the main character. The focus of this project will be to investigate the historical framework surrounding these novels in greater depth than has been done in the past. Many critics either largely ignore the historical context, or they only touch on it superficially. It is important to revisit the ongoing debates of the time concerning women professionals to determine how ge...
The Female Patient: American Women Writers Narrating Medicine and Psychology, 1890-1930
Arizona State University, 2016
use the novel form to examine medical culture during and after the turn of the 20th century. These authors insert the viewpoint of the woman patient to expose problematics of gendered medical relationships, women's roles in medicine, and the complexities of the pre-Freudian medical environment. In doing so, the goal of revising medicine's dominant narratives and literature's role in that objective can be achieved. The focus on the female 2 Alcohol as main ingredient in patent medicines, including Pinkham's, is discussed in A. Walker Bingham's text The Snake Oil Syndrome. In Sarah Stage's Female Complaints about Pinkham, the company claimed the alcohol, 18%, was only used to preserve the ingredients, and no woman would drink a whole bottle. 3 Pinkham wrote the letters herself until her death in 1883, and after this, women were still encouraged to write to 'Mrs. Pinkham'. She received in one year, according to Elbert Hubbard's biased biography, "one hundred thousand letters" (30) and each received a personal reply, with medical advice. See Edd Applegate, The Rise of Advertising in the United States.
Overview of women and medicine in the classical world: 1. Women as Objects of Theory 2. The Role of Women in Reproduction 3. Women as Objects of Practice 4. Women as Healers
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.