Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara by Sara L. Crosby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara by Sara L. Crosby Lindsey Grubbs Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara. By Sara L. Crosby. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, ed. Sharon Ruston, Alice Jenkins, and Catherine Belling. xvii + 257 pp. $89.99 hardcover/$59.99 softcover/$44.99 e-book. Sara Crosby’s Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is a wide-ranging, informative, and accessible text written in a compelling style. Focusing on the evolving trope of the “poisonous woman,” Crosby places insightful readings of texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, and others in valuable medical, political, and biographical contexts (3). The book illuminates networks of authorship, tracing clear lines of influence across the latter half of the nineteenth century. It will be particularly useful for scholars working on Stowe and her circle, literature and medicine, and representations of women in public or professional roles from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The five chapters of the book build convincingly upon one another to trace authorial disputes over the figure of the poisonous woman. In the first, introductory chapter, Crosby establishes the stakes of these debates, describing the long history of women’s association with poison, which she calls “the most fundamental, nigh-untouchable, intractable, and enduring thesis of misogyny” (3). From its origins in Greek myth, she demonstrates how this trope evolved in the nineteenth century into the “Democratic poisoner” (9), the female victim of elite men (think Beatrice Rappacini). She partners this analysis with an overview of the rise of popular medicine movements, in which women’s association with poisonous substances might finally be interpreted as curative or beneficent. Rather than tracing more traditional medical histories, then, Crosby focuses on this revision of the female poisoner, which she calls the “lever” that “shifted the world,” enabling new ways to understand women and people of color in public roles like physician (ix). Crosby traces the origin of this feminist version of the poisonous woman to Cassy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to whom much of the rest of the book is dedicated. Chapter 2 lays the argumentative foundation for the book, which is that Cassy represents a departure from previous models of the avenging female poisoner, thus creating a new cultural figure—the benevolent, feminist, homeopathic poisoner. To support this argument, Crosby outlines Stowe’s particular investment in homeopathy. While conventional medicine often employed poisons to purge the ill, homeopathic medicine used poisons diluted to harmless, miniscule [End Page 158] doses meant to stimulate the body’s own healing process. Crosby suggests that, in using a small dose of laudanum to kill her child to spare him the violence of enslavement, Cassy acts as homeopathic healer rather than avenging victim, introducing a new model of female poisoner. This representation, disseminated so widely through the popularity of Stowe’s text, thus altered perceptions of women’s association with dangerous substances in ways that enabled the rise of women in medicine. Through a reading of Stowe’s play The Christian Slave, Crosby’s third chapter provides further evidence that Cassy was central to Stowe’s vision in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While the so-called Tom Shows that adapted Stowe’s novel tended to diminish and sanitize Cassy, Stowe—working with the mixed-race actress Mary Webb—increased the role despite the major cuts required to fit the novel to stage. Reading Stowe’s play alongside other stage works, contemporary reviews, writings on the moral status of plays, and sensationalized pamphlets about female poisoners, Crosby clarifies the cultural landscape in which Stowe and Webb used Cassy to advocate for increased public roles for women. In chapter 4, Crosby reads texts by authors in Stowe’s network as rebuttals to her poisoner-as-feminist-homeopath model. Tracing the development of the trope of the toxic mixed-race or “Spanish” woman, she focuses primarily on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner and E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Vivia; or the...