The Woman Physician In Late Nineteenth Century American Literature

Author : Sara L. Crosby
Publisher : Springer
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2018-09-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783319964638

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Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Sara L. Crosby Pdf

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.

Author : Margaret Jay Jessee
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2021-12-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000554441

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Female Physicians in American Literature by Margaret Jay Jessee Pdf

Female Physicians in American Literature traces the woman physician character throughout her varying depictions in 19th-century literature, from her appearance in sensational fiction as an evil abortionist to her more well-known idyllic, feminine presence in novels of realism and regionalism. "Murderess," "hag," "She-Devil," "the instrument of the very vilest crime known in the annals of hell"—these are just a few descriptions of women abortionists in popular 19th-century sensational fiction. In novels of regionalism, however, she is often depicted as moral, feminine, and self-sacrificing. This dichotomy, Jessee argues, reveals two opposing literary approaches to registering the national fears of all that both women and abortion evoke: the terrifying threats to white, masculine, Anglo-American male supremacy.

Author : Carla Bittel
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2012-06-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781469606446

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Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America by Carla Bittel Pdf

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 that women physicians endangered the profession. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), a physician from New York, worked to prove them wrong and argued that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America is the first full-length biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the most significant woman physician of her era and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. Jacobi rose to national prominence in the 1870s and went on to practice medicine, teach, and conduct research for over three decades. She campaigned for co-education, professional opportunities, labor reform, and suffrage--the most important women's rights issues of her day. Downplaying gender differences, she used the laboratory to prove that women were biologically capable of working, learning, and voting. Science, she believed, held the key to promoting and producing gender equality. Carla Bittel's biography of Jacobi offers a piercing view of the role of science in nineteenth-century women's rights movements and provides historical perspective on continuing debates about gender and science today.

Author : Cecil Berit Marshall
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Electronic
ISBN : UCSD:31822000712315

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The Woman Physician in Late Nineteenth Century American Literature by Cecil Berit Marshall Pdf

Author : Susan Wells
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9780299171735

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Out of the Dead House by Susan Wells Pdf

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science. Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read. Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.

Author : Miriam S. Gogol
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2020-07-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498546799

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Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950 by Miriam S. Gogol Pdf

Working Women in American Literature, 1865–1950 consists of eight original essays by literary, historical, and multicultural critics on the subject of working women in late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century American literature. The volume examines how the American working woman has been presented, misrepresented, and underrepresented in American realistic and naturalistic literature (1865–1930), and by later authors influenced by realism and naturalism. Points explored include: the historical vocational realities of working women (e.g., factory workers, seamstresses, maids, teachers, writers, prostitutes, etc.); the distortions in literary representations of female work; the ways in which these representations still inform the lives of working women today; and new perspectives from queer theory, immigrant studies, and race and class analyses. These essays draw on current feminist thought while remaining mindful of the historicity of the context. The essayists discuss important women writers of the period (for instance, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rachel Crothers, Willa Cather, and the understudied Ann Petry), as well as canonical writers like Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, and William Dean Howells. The discussions touch on a variety of literary and artistic genres: novels, short stories, other forms of fiction, biographies, dramas, and films. In the introductory essay and throughout the collection, the term “working women in the United States” is deconstructed; the historical and cultural definitions of “work,” and the words “work in America” are redefined through the lens of genders.

Author : Mark Storey
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2015-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780190272425

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Rural Fictions, Urban Realities by Mark Storey Pdf

This study of late 19th-century American literature uses the period's rural fiction to reveal the increasingly intricate and sometimes problematic connections between urban and rural life.

Author : Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0874137713

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The Crux by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Pdf

"What a treat to have another Gilman novel--until now largely ignored--available. We are indebted to Duke University Press for publishing it as a separate piece and to Dana Seitler for her provocative and stimulating introduction. "The Crux" is in many ways a period piece embodying what today seems outmoded and sometimes outrageous views. Oddly, these same views are also startlingly and wickedly relevant today."--Ann J. Lane, author of "To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman "

Author : Hannah Gardner Creamer
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0252028074

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Delia's Doctors; Or, A Glance Behind the Scenes by Hannah Gardner Creamer Pdf

This early feminist novel is a wickedly funny slice of mid-nineteenth-century Americana peppered with details of the era's freakish medical tactics and leavened with a smart and sassy commentary about the societal restraints on women's physical and intellectual abilities. First published in 1852, Delia's Doctors is one of four known novels by Hannah Gardner Creamer, an American writer whose life and career have been all but absent from the annals of American history. In the book, eighteen-year-old Delia Thornton is ill. Her condition, more psychological than physical, worsens during the bitter winter, even as doctor after doctor attempts to cure her. As Delia typifies the female heroine whose sickness is aggravated by listlessness and inactivity, her brother's financee Adelaide Wilmot, is Delia's more robust counterpart. Adelaide thinks she could do anything, if only she were a man, and she dreams of being a physician. Quick to point out the shortcomings of male doctors in treating female illnesses, Adelaide saves Delia and delivers a series of arguments against New England patriarchy. Nina Baym's introduction provides historical context and discusses the book's feminist perspectives.

Author : Kristin J. Jacobson,Kristin Allukian,Rickie-Ann Legleitner,Leslie Allison
Publisher : Springer
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2018-05-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783319738512

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Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature by Kristin J. Jacobson,Kristin Allukian,Rickie-Ann Legleitner,Leslie Allison Pdf

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 518 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : History
ISBN : 0253207207

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Journal of Women's History Guide to Periodical Literature by Anonim Pdf

"Gayle V. Fischer has produced a terrifically useful volume that no research library should be without." —The Journal of American History " . . . an indispensable resource to finding material on women's history throughout the world." —Journal of World History " . . . the work is recommended for its currency, depth of coverage, and scope." —Ethnic Forum As part of its mission to disseminate feminist scholarship and serve as the journal of record for the new area of women's history, the Journal of Women's History began a compilation of periodical literature dealing with women's history. This volume is drawn from more than 750 journals and includes material published from 1980 through 1990. There are forty subject categories and numerous subcategories. The guide lists more than 5,500 articles; all are extensively cross-listed.

Author : Stephanie P. Browner
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2013-03-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780812201482

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Profound Science and Elegant Literature by Stephanie P. Browner Pdf

In 1847, at the first meeting of the American Medical Association, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the profession, "once venerated," no longer earned homage "spontaneously and universally." The medical marketplace was crowded and competitive; state laws regulating medical practice had been repealed; and professional practitioners were often branded by their lay competitors as aristocrats bent on establishing a health care monopoly. By 1900, the battles were over, and, as the president of AMA had hoped, doctors were now widely venerated as men of profound science, elegant literature, polite accomplishments, and virtue. In fact, by 1900 the doctor had replaced the minister as the most esteemed professional in the United States; disease loomed larger than damnation; and science promised to manage the discord, differences, and excesses that democracy seemed to license. In Profound Science and Elegant Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory—and demonstrates at the same time that medicine's claims to somatic expertise and managerial talent did not go uncontested. Even as elite physicians founded institutions that made professional medicine's authority visible and legitimate, many others worried about the violence that might attend medicine's drive to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, educated masculinity. Reading fiction by a wide range of authors beside and against medical texts, Browner looks to the ways in which writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral damage that might be done as science installed its peculiar understanding of the body. A work of impressive interdisciplinary reach, Profound Science and Elegant Literature documents both the extraordinary rise of professional medicine in the United States and the aesthetic imperative to make the body meaningful that led many American writers to resist the medicalized body.

Author : Felicity M. Turner
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2022-08-02
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781469669717

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Proving Pregnancy by Felicity M. Turner Pdf

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving Pregnancy documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before. Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.

Author : Rima D. Apple
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 1987-12-16
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9780299114831

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Mothers and Medicine by Rima D. Apple Pdf

In the nineteenth century, infants were commonly breast-fed; by the middle of the twentieth century, women typically bottle-fed their babies on the advice of their doctors. In this book, Rima D. Apple discloses and analyzes the complex interactions of science, medicine, economics, and culture that underlie this dramatic shift in infant-care practices and women’s lives. As infant feeding became the keystone of the emerging specialty of pediatrics in the twentieth century, the manufacture of infant food became a lucrative industry. More and more mothers reported difficulty in nursing their babies. While physicians were establishing themselves and the scientific experts and the infant-food industry was hawking the scientific bases of their products, women embraced “scientific motherhood,” believing that science could shape child care practices. The commercialization and medicalization of infant care established an environment that made bottle feeding not only less feared by many mothers, but indeed “natural” and “necessary.” Focusing on the history of infant feeding, this book clarifies the major elements involved in the complex and sometimes contradictory interaction between women and the medical profession, revealing much about the changing roles of mothers and physicians in American society. “The strength of Apple’s book is her ability to indicate how the mutual interests of mothers, doctors, and manufacturers led to the transformation of infant feeding. . . . Historians of science will be impressed with the way she probes the connections between the medical profession and the manufacturers and with her ability to demonstrate how medical theories were translated into medical practice.”—Janet Golden, Isis

Author : Jacalyn Duffin
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1999-12-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781487589585

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Langstaff by Jacalyn Duffin Pdf

A unique and readable microhistory of an ordinary physician and his community during a period of revolutionary medical change. Duffin bases her insights on a detailed computer-assisted analysis of 40 years of extant daybooks of James Langstaff (1825-1889).