- Detailed table of contents
- Editorial
- James Alsop: Narratives of Class, Gender and Medicine in the American South: The Dr. Annie Alexander Story
- Meredith Eliassen: The San Francisco Experiment: Female Medical Practitioners Caring for Women and Children, 1875-1935
- Gabriela Schenk: How to Fail: Female Medical Students and Women Doctors in Popular Fiction around 1900
- Michelle Iwen: Women Writers and the Pathologizing of Gender in 18th-Century English Mad-Discourse
- Nadine Muller: Hystoriographic Metafiction: The Victorian Madwoman and Women’s Mental Health in 21st-Century British Fiction
- Christine Marks: Hysteria, Doctor-Patient Relationships, and Identity Boundaries in Siri Hustvedt’s “What I Loved”
- Outlook
This special issue of gender forum focuses on the intersections between medicine, literature, and gender. The interest in the interface of literature and medicine from the specific point of view of gender is triggered by the intriguing similarities between the medical and literary disciplines (cf. Brieger 402-06). The doctor, like the literary scholar, is faced with a text, a narrative voiced by the patient either through language or bodily symptoms. In order to understand this narrative, the doctor, like the scholar, needs to listen closely, to examine the constituents of the narrative carefully, to consider the subjectivity of the narrative, to read between the lines, and to interpret ambiguities coded in metaphorical language (cf. Brody; Davis).
