Unsettling Medicine: The Social Dimension of Nineteenth-Century American Medical Practice (original) (raw)
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This dissertation traces the debates concerning the professionalization of medicine in America across the 19 th-and well into the 20 th-century and explores how the debates concerning professionalization in any given moment affected popular literary forms. Using Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious as its theoretical framework, this dissertation's chapters on the gothic, realism, naturalism, and satire trace each mode's dominant hegemonic position on this issue while showcasing dissenting voices across this century-long discourse. This project's methodology is centered in the New Historicism. Unlike other projects before it, this dissertation focuses primarily on the historical problem of state laws either regulating or deregulating the professionalization of medicine; however, it also emphasizes close attention to literary form as it traces the dominant and dissenting voices of these popular literary modes. Authors surveyed across this project include
Amerikastudien/American Studies
In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Phil Whitaker explains why a substantial number of well-known writers are also medical doctors. Whitaker, who belongs in this group himself, lists Anton Chekhov, Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, and a few others, to state his point: "Their ability to feel what others feel, and simultaneously to view it with detachment, gives us perhaps our greatest strength as writers." Importantly, it is the physician's skills that pave the way towards writing as a profession, and not literary excellence that helps make a professional healer: doctors virtually read "[e]ach patient's illness" as "a narrative-symptoms as the beginning, diagnosis as the ending-and a middle that weaves a coherent and irresistible path between the two." Such explanations sound logical and comprehensible, yet they evoke new questions as well: why does it seem to be, almost exclusively, men, who translate their interaction with patients into poetry and prose? What motivates them to do so? Does their creative engagement inform their work as medical doctors? And, most importantly, perhaps: what do we learn about the medical profession, about writing, about an era, when we replace the hierarchical concept of the doctor-becoming-awriter by the idea of a mutually inspiring relationship between two systems of knowledge acquisition? Sari Altschuler's The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States builds on this idea of reciprocity. The book approaches "the practice of writing" as a "valuable training of the medical mind" (5) and discusses a number of well-known American physician-writers who wrote poetry or prose between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As public intellectuals, they relied on what Altschuler calls "imaginative experimentation" (8-11) to study and discuss health-related topics, test medical theories, fill research gaps, and solve medical and philosophical contradictions. Unlike Joan Burbick's Healing the Republic (1994) and other path-breaking publications in the field of medical humanities, The Medical Imagination does not reference physicians' writings to make a general statement about national health or American culture: carefully researched and very readable, the book sketches out an intellectually agile and dynamic community of early American physician-writers. It sheds light on individual biographies and friendships, emphasizes generational and cross-generational connections and conversations, and carves out the political concerns of individual participants who steered the relationship between health and literature in new directions. These medical men believed in the power of narrative to either cure or cause harm, but instead of resorting to narratives of healing, they preferred to outline and discuss the relationship between art and science, "imaginative experimentation," and "reductive, mechanistic paradigms" (102). Building on a variety of contexts, and rich in detail, The Medical Imagination offers an in-depth analysis of the life and oeuvre of key figures in American medical and literary history, including Benjamin Rush,
Medical history, 2024
This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.
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.
The Frustration of State Medicine 1880–1899
Medical History, 1967
The aim of this Department has always been to secure a basis of scientific principle for the sanitary practice of the country; to found recommendations for the maintenance of health in the community upon the teachings of physiology and medicine; and to conduct investigations into disease and its causes by the light of the best contemporary knowledge of pathology. By firm adherence to this method Mr. Simon came to direct a medical department which, while fulfilling important duties to the Government, had the complete confidence of sanitary workers throughout England and abroad, and brought the knowledge of hygienic science to a high point of public usefulness. It would be a disaster to sanitary progress as weU as a serious misfortune to the Board, if your Medical Officer should, by reason of his utter preoccupation in routine business, lose sight of the true aim of his office, and cease to guide his Department by the only trustworthy principles of sanitary action.-Dr. George Buchanan to Sir Charles DiLke, 17 November 1883. 1 This investigation was supported in part by assistance from the Weilcome Trust and by USPHS Grant No. 5-F1-MH-23, 115-02 from the National Institute of Mental Health. I am grateful to Dr. Richard Thorne-Thome, of Weybridge, Surrey, for information about his father; to Lord Balemo, of the House of Cockburn, Balemo, Midlothian, for the use of his Memoir of the Buchanan Family, and in particular ofGeorge Buchanan, 1831-1895, (printed privately, Aberdeen University Press, 1941); and to Sir Arthur MacNalty, for his early advice and for the background material made available in his 'History of State Medicine in England',
Introduction: Medical Women in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2018
Introduction: Medical Women in Nineteenth-Century American Literature the woman healer through much of modern history, women in ancient Greece served primarily as midwives, and only men were able to study medicine legally. Agnodice was one of these midwives, but circa 300 bc, she dressed as a man and entered the study of medicine: "She studied under the great physicians of her day" (Levin 37). Agnodice was ultimately found out to be a woman and was condemned to death for her deceit; however, because she was so well-respected, there was a public outcry for her release, which successfully saved her life. Agnodice was subsequently acquitted, and the law that restricted women's rights in medicine was annulled (37). Agnodice went on to study women's health issues, and more women followed in her footsteps. In fact, as
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.