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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.
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.
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.
Dick met the gaze of a pair of frank dark eyes, which were scanning his face with a look of friendly interest, and his thoughts flew back to the time which had elapsed between his leaving Sandhurst and obtaining his appointment to the Indian Staff Corps years ago. He had spent some months at home, to the great disgust of his uncle, the general, who vowed that this spell of idleness would ruin him for life, but he did nothing worse than fall in love with his sister's greatest friend. (source: text)
Cora is newly-wed, the wife of the handsome Doctor Frank. The couple goes for their first visit to Frank's family comprising his mother and his sister Emily. But Cora is stunned to discover that Frank's family are even more successful than what she had imagined. And Frank is the well-loved son in the family and she sets off to prove to them her worth as his doting wife. The book is written in form of a journal with Cora narrating the events to her own mother.
This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of literary genres and forms, such as poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction, engaged with political questions and participated in political debate.
"During the second half of the nineteenth century, the medical profession in America began to transform itself from a motley group of practitioners--registering remarkably disparate levels of education, expertise, and credibility--into a cohesive and exclusive body, enjoying ever-increasing status and income and solidifying what social historians have termed their "professional sovereignty" within the larger culture. The concomitant appearance of numerous novels and stories preoccupied with the figure and the business of the doctor suggests that these texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only documented but also intervened in the professionalization of medicine. Scientific Methods juxtaposes literary texts with non-literary documents and with material culture in order to determine the nature and the extent of these interventions and to delineate competing narratives within the history of medicine. By interrogating a range of professional performances represented in American fiction between 1880 and 1940, Scientific Methods establishes a complementary narrative to accounts of medical professionalization constructed by social historians. Although social historians have managed to destabilize the master narratives of scientific progress elaborated by the physician-historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their investigations into the history of professionalization still tend to center on physicians in conflict with each other and in thrall to science and technology, neglecting public perceptions of the professionalization process. Literary representations of this process, on the other hand, chart the ways in which popular understandings of the figure and the business of the physician arose and circulated, elucidating points of accord and disparity between professional ideologies and lived experience and exposing dynamics of power between doctors and patients. These fictions of medical professionalization both reflected and produced beliefs; thus they stand as essential tools for understanding the consolidation of authority around doctors. In addition, I utilize a diverse range of archival materials--from hospital records to WPA posters--to complicate my readings of these fictional engagements with the professionalization process and to illuminate the relationship of literature to other cultural domains. I argue that this textual sequence recasts the pursuit of professionalism and the gradual consolidation of cultural authority around doctors as a constant tension between the discipline of self--as the popularity of nineteenth-century "conduct books" for physicians demonstrates--and the discipline of Others. Lacking pervasive cultural authority at the end of the nineteenth century, doctors concentrated upon cultivating professional identity through professional "pantomimes" that simultaneously demonstrated their mastery of specialized knowledge and of middle-class social norms. Eventually, these professional "pantomimes" migrated from the stage of community practice to the arena of eminently consumable, ubiquitous popular entertainments such as radio programs and public art. This movement coordinates with an increasing amount of cultural authority and a decreasing need for individual self-discipline within the profession, and with doctors--a group overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and male--feeling freer than ever to visit spectacular and invasive violence upon the raced, class, and gendered bodies of Others. These disciplinary measures include the exclusion or removal of nonwhite male and white female practitioners from the medical profession, elaborated in Frank Norris's McTeague; human experimentation by the single-minded "microbe hunters" on southern populations during the interwar period, romanticized in Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith; and eugenic pressure exerted on poor women by the Depression-era discourses of public health, critiqued by Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio and Meridel LeSueur's italicThe Girl. Yet far from reflecting an idealized vision of the medical professional, replete with cultural authority, these narrations of disciplinary events reveal doctors threatened by incursions by nonwhite and female practitioners, defeated by their own experimental protocols, and agitated by the unlimited reproduction of the working class."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.
The female performer with a public voice constitutes a remarkably vibrant theme in British and American narratives of the long nineteenth century. The tension between fictional female performers and other textual voices can be seen to refigure the cultural debate over the ‘voice’ of women in aesthetically complex ways. By focusing on singers, actresses, preachers and speakers, this book traces and explores an important tradition of feminine articulation. Drawing on critical approaches in literary studies, gender studies and philosophy, the book conceptualizes voice for the discussion of narrative texts. Examining voice both as a thematic concern and as an aesthetic effect, the individual chapters analyse how the actual articulation by female performers correlates with their cultural visibility and agency. What this study foregrounds is how women characters succeed in making themselves heard even if their voices are silenced in the end.