Guest Editor, special issue of Arizona Quarterly: American Literature, Culture, and Theory. “Medical Women in American Literature.” (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
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.
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...
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,
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.
2009
Gender forum is an online, peer reviewed academic journal dedicated to the discussion of gender issues. As an electronic journal, gender forum offers a free-of-charge platform for the discussion of gender-related topics in the fields of literary and cultural production, media and the arts as well as politics, the natural sciences, medicine, the law, religion and philosophy. Inaugurated by Prof. Dr. Beate Neumeier in 2002, the quarterly issues of the journal have focused on a multitude of questions from different theoretical perspectives of feminist criticism, queer theory, and masculinity studies. gender forum also includes reviews and occasionally interviews, fictional pieces and poetry with a gender studies angle. Opinions expressed in articles published in gender forum are those of individual authors and not necessarily endorsed by the editors of gender forum. Submissions Target articles should conform to current MLA Style (8th edition