Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s by Alison Moulds

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s by Alison Moulds Kristin E. Kondrlik (bio) Alison Moulds, Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. xiv + 288, $119.99/£89.99 hard-cover. In the Victorian era, reform legislation, pressure to professionalize, divisions between consultants and general practitioners, and a flood of women into the medical profession destabilized physicians’ collective professional identity. Building on her previous work on the Victorian medical press, Alison Moulds’s Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s maps how physicians negotiated this uncertainty. Moulds argues that medical professionals were active producers and consumers of print culture, serving as “editors, contributors, correspondents, readers, authors, and reviewers” (4). They used these roles to shape and understand the identity of physician. In discussing five groups—young doctors, metropolitan physicians, country doctors, medical women, and colonial practitioners— Moulds employs a rich interdisciplinary approach adopted from cultural and social histories of medicine, the history of the professions, and literary and periodical studies. Moulds first addresses representations of young physicians and draws on a diverse textual corpus: fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle and Samuel Warren, advice manuals by practicing physicians, and articles and [End Page 297] correspondence in medical journals including the Lancet and British Medical Journal (BMJ). She argues that texts about and for young physicians provided warnings about the difficulties they would face, including financial hardship, connecting with patients, establishing relationships with colleagues, and navigating medical ethics. Moulds illuminates how, through the representation of this figure, print culture also illustrated conflicts consuming Victorian medical practice, such as poverty, professional squabbling, disagreements about medical training, and stiff competition in an overrun marketplace. Thus, she argues, literary texts, advice literature, and medical periodicals all contributed to the young doctor’s identity and that of the profession more broadly. Moulds then turns to metropolitan physicians. Engaging popular and professional texts, Moulds first highlights representations of elite physicians in London, who “were often portrayed as technically brilliant but morally ambivalent and even villainous” (94). She contrasts these figures with representations of metropolitan physicians serving the poor and undesirable. While the medical establishment sometimes derided work among these groups, Moulds argues that physicians serving such populations were frequently represented as self-sacrificing and noble, “elevating [them] above the perceived indignities of [their] work” (107). Thus, representations of metropolitan physicians were “bifurcated” between the elite and non-elite (107). Periodical scholars will be interested in how Moulds painstakingly traces the founding of metropolitan journals such as the Lancet and the Medical Circular as well as the relocation of provincial journals such as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal (later the BMJ) to London, which contributed to London’s increasing status as an international center of medical knowledge. Metropolitan practitioners were often compared to country doctors, the focus of the next chapter. Moulds cautions readers, however, that country and city doctors did not form a perfect binary. Rather, in contrast to stereotypes of country doctors as lazy, backwards, or disconnected, Victorian writers described complex interactions between provincial physicians, patients, and their communities. Professional journals and literary representations reveal distinct challenges for provincial doctors, including competition, prescription fees, rivalries, complex class and gender issues in patient treatment, and community gossip. Moulds argues that medical periodicals especially served as “textual space[s] through which the country practitioner’s identity was constructed and his professional networks were formed” (118). Of interest in this chapter for periodical scholars is Moulds’s in-depth discussion of the Medical Circular and Medical Miscellany (later Provincial Medical Journal), which provided country doctors with cutting-edge research while recognizing the busy realities of their practices. [End Page 298] Moulds turns from regional distinctions to medical women in the next chapter. She argues that, unlike male practitioners, the identity of “medical women” was defined by alterity with “physicians.” First, Moulds highlights how debates about medical women’s status evolved in the Victorian era. In medical journals, debate around these figures was shaped by editorial choices and generic features, such as correspondence and news columns, leading articles, and reprinted debates from professional societies. She notes how campaigners for and opponents of medical women used these genres to negotiate their place...