Gender and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Since the beginning of Women's Studies as a field of inquiry, feminist scholars have been interested in the relationship of gender and scientific/ medical concepts and practices. The nineteenth century has attracted more attention than earlier or later periods, perhaps because over the course of that century developments in the medical and biological sciences provided an impetus for the domination of health care by the emerging profession of mostly male and white allopathic physicians. Although these physicians and scientists did not eliminate other ways of healing or understanding human bodies, by the early years of the twentieth century, the scientific view of the body and disease was clearly dominant, enjoying institutional and popular support. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarship has explored the gender dimensions of the scientific and professional transformations of the nineteenth century. How have the medical profession and the biological sciences influenced women's ideas about self and body and shaped women's experiences of health and illness? How have medical outsiders-patients, medical consumers, lay caretakers, and medical practitioners not male or not white-resisted and contributed to the medical paradigm? How did new scientific understandings shape representations of self and body in non-scientific texts? Each of the four books under review enhances our understanding of one or more of these questions from the perspectives of history, rhetoric, or literary studies. The two works by historians begin in the nineteenth century but extend into the twentieth. Emily K. Abel's Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940 is an elegantly written historical analysis of the ways women's caregiving roles changed in response to the