Editorial
As recent as half a century ago, the history of medicine was primarily a field preoccupied with the development of medical ideas about diseases and treatments and how they changed over time. After the rise and intervention of the "new" social history, the field has now expanded to being more attentive to the voice of the patient, a methodological turn advocated by such historians of medicine as Roy Porter. Writing women back into the grand historical narrative of medicine can certainly be viewed as one of the decisive consequences of this historiographical transformation since the 1960s. However, as the scholarship of Thomas Laqueur (Making Sex, 1990) and Charlotte Furth (A Flourishing Yin, 1999) has made clear, to make issues of gender and the body more pertinent to the history of medicine oftentimes requires a complete re-evaluation of the analytic category of gender itself. In other words, the revisionist task should not stop at the level of making sure more "voices" are heard. Whether we treat the rise of the two-sex model in Enlightenment Europe or the emergence of gynecology in Song China as a paradigmatic turning point in the history of medicine, the methodological turn to "culture," broadly defined, from social history should inspire us not only to improve grand narratives on a more empirically-inclusive ground, though this should rightfully be a priority, but also to reassess the assumptions embedded within the framing of any narrative from the very outset.
This double-bind concern is a central feature of all four essays collected in this special issue of gender forum, which explores the history of both Chinese and Western medicine. Readers are encouraged to turn to the paper abstracts for a summary of the key points developed in each essay. Here, I will restrict myself to providing a brief overview of how the four articles inter-relate in order to show that, together, they actually accomplish something more profound than a simple collection of "gendered voices" in the history of medicine. Patricia Rosof's piece documents the journey of a woman physician, Dr. Florence Sabin. Rosof's feminist analysis, grounded in solid archival research, suggests that the history of the American medical profession cannot be adequately understood without some due attention to its gendered dimension. Rather than being a simple compilation of various women's "voices" in the past, her study pushes us to re-think what we think we already know about the history of American medicine by offering an illuminating perspective of the intersections between social-economic forces and female physicians' professional hopes, fears, desires, experiences, and identities during the formative years of modern America. Hsiaowen Cheng picks up this thread of articulating the gendered dimension of medical history by bringing into better visibility traces of women's active participation in the formation and actualization of medical knowledge in Song China. As Cheng astutely demonstrates in her analysis, rather than playing the role of passive actors in the history of Chinese medicine, women acquired medical knowledge on their own terms, were thus well-informed about alternative treatment methods and explanations, and constantly questioned the male doctor's authority.
Cheng's insights strike great resonance with Tereasa Maillie's work on women and depression in imperial China. In her analysis of poems written by women throughout the eleventh to the eighteenth century, Maillie concludes that the clinical category of "depression" is in fact a valid prism through which we could understand how certain women felt in China prior to the arrival of Western psychiatry. The historical relationship between forms of gendered experience and systems of psychiatric knowledge constitutes the central preoccupation of my own piece on the genealogical bases of the modern notion of "sexual freedom." I argue that what is important about the establishment and consolidation of sexology as a scientific discipline around the turn of the twentieth century is not just the rise of its formal disciplinarity, but the production of a broader transformation in the way people conceived of themselves with respect to the conceptual space in which their erotic inclinations, behaviors, and selfhood were understood. With this epistemological transformation secured in place by the 1920s, women's intimate experience also took on an entirely different set of historical figuration and signification. The New Woman, the modern lesbian, and female sexual freedom now all became possible conceptual candidates for making sense of women's experience: they were decisively absent prior to the unfolding of the historical transition from the mere "psychiatrization" of sex to the more general "scientification" of sex that I outline in the article.
The four pieces in the present collection show that the gendered dimension of medical history has not only functioned on the level of ideas and ideology, but, more importantly, bear some fundamental connections to historical actors' individual practice and personal experience. Therefore, I have chosen the phrase "gender praxes" in the subtitle of this volume to articulate the unifying theme that ties the four articles together, in that each piece addresses much more than the history of medical ideas about gender. This volume is as much about these conceptions as about how they were embodied in the lived experiences of real people-doctors and patients, teachers and students, men and women-and how they have been embedded across culture in our past and present concerns.
Acknowledgements
The initial impetus for putting together this special issue of gender forum comes from a conference held at Princeton University on 4 April 2008, Apparatus XY: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Science, Gender, and Sexuality, which I co-organized with Nathan Ha in the History of Science Program. I want to especially thank Hsiaowen Cheng and Tereasa Maillie for their willingness to revise their conference papers for inclusion in this volume. I thank Patricia Rosof for sharing her work on Florence Sabin, which was not originally included in the conference program. I also wish to extend my gratitude to Angela N. H. Creager, the faculty advisor for the event, and to the official sponsors that funded the conference, including The Graduate School, the Department of History, the Program in History of Science, the Program in the Study of Women and Gender, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, all at Princeton University. Miss Amy Shortt offered generous help and support in overseeing the conference's logistical matters.