Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Author: Sara L. Crosby

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-14

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 3319964631

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This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

Author: Janice P. Nimura

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0393635554

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New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography "Janice P. Nimura has resurrected Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell in all their feisty, thrilling, trailblazing splendor." —Stacy Schiff Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world at first recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity ultimately won her the acceptance of the male medical establishment. In 1849, she became the first woman in America to receive an M.D. She was soon joined in her iconic achievement by her younger sister, Emily, who was actually the more brilliant physician. Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies, and enduring partnership, Janice P. Nimura presents a story of trial and triumph. Together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights—or with each other. From Bristol, Paris, and Edinburgh to the rising cities of antebellum America, this richly researched new biography celebrates two complicated pioneers who exploded the limits of possibility for women in medicine. As Elizabeth herself predicted, "a hundred years hence, women will not be what they are now."

Women in Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century
Women in Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: Claire Brock

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-31

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1040016162

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The volume explores the range of reactions to medical women from the mid-nineteenth century up until the start of the Great War in 1914. By covering this period, readers will be introduced to ongoing debates surrounding women in medicine, via sources which explore the possibilities for – as well as the problems of – female professional practice. The perspectives of detractors and supporters, as well as medical women themselves, are taken into account, and especial consideration given to opinions which were not neatly divided along gender lines. Of key concern here is a nuanced tracing through primary material of changes in the perception of medical women, as well as the ways in which lingering prejudices disappeared or remained well into the twentieth century. This volume focuses on two key areas: first, the debates and challenges around medical and surgical education for women; and, second, women’s physical and mental ‘fitness’ to practise. The reproduction of previously unpublished student magazines, both from the foundational London School of Medicine for Women, as well as medical schools which considered admitting women during this period, are an original feature of this volume. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this title will be of great interest to students of Women's History and the History of Medicine.

Medical Muses
Medical Muses

Author: Asti Hustvedt

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1408822350

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In 1862 the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris became the epicenter of the study of hysteria, the mysterious illness then thought to affect half of all women. There, prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's contentious methods caused furore within the church and divided the medical community. Treatments included hypnosis, piercing and the evocation of demons and, despite the controversy they caused, the experiments became a fascinating and fashionable public spectacle. Medical Muses tells the stories of the women institutionalised in the Salpêtrière. Theirs is a tale of science and ideology, medicine and the occult, of hypnotism, sadism, love and theatre. Combining hospital records, municipal archives, memoirs and letters, Medical Muses sheds new light on a crucial moment in psychiatric history.

Women Healers and Physicians
Women Healers and Physicians

Author: Lilian R. Furst

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 0813181666

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Women have traditionally been expected to tend the sick as part of their domestic duties; yet throughout history they have faced an uphill struggle to be accepted as healers outside the household. In this provocative anthology, twelve essays by historians and literary scholars explore the work of women as healers and physicians. The essays range across centuries, nations, and cultures to focus on the ideological and practical obstacles women have faced in the world of medicine. Each examines the situation of women healers in a particular time and place through cases that are emblematic of larger issues and controversies in that period. The stories presented here are typical of different but parallel facets of women's history in medicine. The first six concern the controversial relationship between magic and medicine and the perception that women healers can harm or enchant as well as cure. Women frequently were banished to the edges of medical practice because their spiritualism or unorthodoxy was considered a threat to conventional medicine. These chapters focus mainly on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but also provide continuity to women healers in African American culture of our own time. The second six essays trace women healers' efforts to seek professional standing, first in fifth-century Greece and Rome and later, on a global scale, in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to actual case studies from Germany, Russia, England, and Australia, these essays consider treatments of women doctors in American fiction and in the writings of Virginia Woolf. Women Healers and Physicians complements existing histories of women in medicine by drawing on varied historical and literary sources, filling gaps in our understanding of women healers and nulling social attitudes about them. Although the contributions differ dramatically, all retain a common focus and create a unique comparative picture of women's struggles to climb the long hill to acceptance in the medical profession.

Unwell Women
Unwell Women

Author: Elinor Cleghorn

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0593182960

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A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health—from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases—brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative. Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy—and the men who controlled their fate—this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women—and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.

Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-century America
Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-century America

Author: Carla Jean Bittel

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0807832839

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In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and th

Gender, Work and Medicine
Gender, Work and Medicine

Author: Elianne Riska

Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited

Published: 1993-08-19

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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This critical assessment of the division of labour in medicine sets current practice in its historical context. The book demonstrates the centrality of gender divisions both between and within the individual medical and health professions - doctors, nurses, midwives and others. Drawing on accounts from different countries and a wide range of professional groups, the contributors examine the extent to which the division of labour is changing and the effect of such changes on the status of women within the health professions. While the proportion of female doctors is rising, the continued constraints on women attaining full equality are explored.

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature
The Female Body in Medicine and Literature

Author: Andrew Mangham

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1846314720

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Drawing on a range of texts from the seventeenth century to the present, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature explores accounts of motherhood, fertility, and clinical procedures for what they have to tell us about the development of women's medicine. The essays here offer nuanced historical analyses of subjects that have received little critical attention, including the relationship between gynecology and psychology and the influence of popular art forms on so-called women's science prior to the twenty-first century. Taken together, these essays offer a wealth of insight into the medical treatment of women and will appeal to scholars in gender studies, literature, and the history of medicine.