Literature and Medicine I

Detailed Table of Contents

Editorial

James Alsop: Narratives of Class, Gender and Medicine in the American South:  The Dr. Annie Alexander Story

Abstract: Dr. Annie Alexander (1864-1929) of Charlotte, North Carolina, was an early general practitioner specializing in the diseases of women and children in the U.S. South. Her life and career were marked by a sense of duty to her community, as an elite southern white woman and physician. The interplay of gender, class, race, and profession can be traced through Alexander’s extensive unpublished essays, medical case records, correspondence and personal papers, and the published reactions of her (largely male) contemporaries. This study seeks to answer the questions: why did an elite southern woman follow a career path selected by few of her peer group, and with what consequences for her and her community?

Author's Bio: James Alsop is a graduate of the Universities of Winnipeg, Western Ontario, and Cambridge. He is a professor Emeritus of History, McMaster University (Canada). The study of Annie Alexander is part of an on-going series of investigations of women in health care in the early twentieth-century American South. His research interests are focused upon the history of health, with particular attention to children and adolescents.

Meredith Eliassen: The San Francisco Experiment:  Female Medical Practitioners Caring for Women and Children, 1875-1935

Abstract: Prior to 1911 when California women gained suffrage, women’s health issues were rarely deemed important. In early 1875, Drs. Charlotte B. Brown and Martha E. Bucknell established the Pacific Dispensary Hospital for Women and Children as a public health model for indigent children and an urban clinical-training facility for female health professionals. This paper will look at how Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown (1846-1904) and Dr. Adelaide Brown (1867-1940), mother and daughter activists for women and children’s health, shaped medicine in San Francisco. They had forceful personalities, yet their experiment to foster a community of female health care providers to directly serve women and children proved to be more fragile than anticipated. After Dr. Charlotte Brown’s death in 1904, her daughter picked up where her mother left off despite opposition to take on the dairy industry throughout her career in long campaigns to regulate milk products.

Author's Bio: Meredith Eliassen earned her M.S.L.I.S. from Simmons College in Boston in 1991 and her B.A. in Broadcast Communications Arts from San Francisco State University in 1988. She works as an archives reference specialist and curator in Special Collections at the J. Paul Leonard Library at San Francisco State University. Ms. Eliassen has taught the history of American children’s literature in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University and through the College of Extended Learning at San Francisco State University. She is interested in local history and the role of legislation in the lives of ordinary families. Her book, San Francisco State University (San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2007) tells the story of the University in pictures. Portions of this article have been presented in “Got Pure Milk? Dr. Adelaide Brown’s Crusade for San Francisco’s Safe Milk Supply,” for The Argonaut: The Journal of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society 18.1 (Spring 2007); as well as a paper focused on Dr. Adelaide Brown’s role in the California Children’s Year, 1918 presented at the Annual Conference of the Organization of American Historians, Washington, D.C, April 21, 2006.

Gabriela Schenk: How to Fail: Female Medical Students and Women Doctors in Popular Fiction around 1900

Abstract: This article is based on novels in the German language, translations into German included, whose protagonists or important minor characters are woman doctors or female medical students. The time frame begins with the admission of women to (European) universities in the second half of the 19th century and extends into the middle of the 20th century. How did authors cope with this new figure, the female (medical) student, the woman doctor? The subject of failure shows up surprisingly often in early stories about female medical students and woman doctors. Following several subjects which were negotiated in the contemporary discourses of the time, I am going to demonstrate the ways that led women respectively female literary characters who wished to become physicians to failure: nursing, success (as strange as it sounds), nonexistent role models, and the fear of loneliness, all expressing conflicts due to gender stereotypes.

Author's Bio: Gabriela Schenk grew up and lives in Zurich, Switzerland. She is a graduate of the University of Zurich and received her Master of Arts degree (lic. phil.) in German Linguistics and Literature, Popular Literature, and Communication in 2001. She works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and continues her research for her doctoral thesis about “Female Physicians in Popular Fiction” at the University of Zurich.

Michelle Iwen: Women Writers and the Pathologizing of Gender in 18th-Century English Mad-Discourse

Abstract: One concern in the history of gendered psychiatric confinement is not that the field lacks good scholarship but that the extant scholarship is focused too narrowly on its height during the 19th century, neglecting the important temporal beginning of the trend in the 18th century. In the United Kingdom, it was in the 18th century that the move to confine became more widespread, prompted at the community, and more specifically, at the family level. This essay traces the philosophical changes in medical discourse as the move toward confinement began focusing more on the incarceration of women and the specific problem of their bodies as newly sexualized beings. Prior to the 18th century, the Galenic, one-sex model dominated both medical and social discourses. It was in the 18th century that women’s bodies became pathologized which prompted the ‘feminization’ of mental illness. Interestingly, women writers of the period both reiterated and resisted this pathologizing of the female body through their mad-discourse, that is, their writing-about-madness. Although the ratio of female to male madhouse admissions disproves the prevalent belief in the mass-incarceration of the ‘deviant’ woman, Francis Burney, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Eliza Haywood each reflect an emerging vision of this trope. It was the nature of confinement that so effected women’s writing reiterating the concept of the deviant woman unjustly confined which, in turn, helped advance this idea in popular culture and eventually into medical discourse. It was this cycle which led to the trope becoming reality in the 19th century as women internalized this threat because of its unique dangers to what was believed to be their inherent female qualities.

Author's Bio: Michelle Iwen is currently a doctoral candidate in Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, Wales. Prior to this, she completed a BA and MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She has presented at multiple conferences in North America, Europe, and the Near East. Her current research focuses on the effect of mad-discourse on 18th-century English women writers. She is also interested in postgender and Foucauldian studies. You are welcome to contact her at IwenME@cardiff.ac.uk.

Nadine Muller: Hystoriographic Metafiction: The Victorian Madwoman and Women’s Mental Health in 21st-Century British Fiction

Abstract: At the turn of the new millennium British fiction obsessively returns to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this revisiting, authors often show a special interest in medical discourses and narratives surrounding women and madness and the ways in which these contemporary discourses were informed by constructions of gender and sexuality. Hence, mad doctors, madwomen and lunatic asylums have become popular characters and settings for these hystorical metafictions, which thematise doctors’ misreadings of patient narratives, that is, of both women’s physical symptoms and their own descriptions of them. Medical discourses and narratives surrounding madness are, then, exposed as reflections of the male doctor’s rather than the female patient’s anxieties, and in a wider context they thus signify society’s deepest fears and ideologies. Through a textual analysis of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005) and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2004), this article points up that these recent examples of British historical fiction can themselves be read as gendered case histories of twenty-first-century British society and that, hence, they do not only critically explore past but also reflect present gendered issues concerning women’s mental health.

Author's Bio: Nadine Muller is a doctoral student at the University of Hull, where her research is funded by an institutional 80th Anniversary Doctoral Scholarship in Neo-Victorianism. Her thesis examines representations of gender and sexuality in twenty-first-century neo-Victorian fiction in the context of post- and third-wave feminisms. Her journal article “Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-Wave Feminisms & Neo-Victorian Fiction” is forthcoming in Neo-Victorian Studies in summer 2009, and she is currently planning a co-edited journal special issue entitled Feminisms, Sex and the Body (with Dr. Mark Llewellyn, University of Liverpool). Nadine is an executive committee member of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK & Ireland (FWSA) and a steering group member of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network (PG CWWN).

Christine Marks: Hysteria, Doctor-Patient Relationships, and Identity Boundaries in Siri Hustvedt’s “What I Loved”

Abstract: In her novel What I Loved, a fictional autobiography written from the perspective of a male art historian, American author Siri Hustvedt reinterprets the relationship between female hysterical patients and their male doctors at the French hospital La Salpêtrière at the end of the nineteenth century. Hustvedt’s portrayal of the way doctors at the time – most prominently Jean-Martin Charcot – treated their female patients at the Salpêtrière reveals complex negotiations of identities; the author’s examination oscillates between an emphasis on the doctor as the dominating mastermind of the hysterics’ behavior and explorations of hysteria as an escape from a society in which women were overpoweringly restricted. In particular, the representation of hysterical patients in one of the main character’s artwork – a series of paintings and installations on the theme of hysteria – highlights aspects of the doctor-patient relationship emerging as an extreme example of a self mastered by the other. The patient is displayed as an object of study (and photography), trapped by the clinical gaze, and a blank slate to be inscribed by the investigator (dermagraphism). Hustvedt’s works highlight the fragility of identity constructions, always showing the self in relation to the other and emphasizing moments of transgression and undecidability. This paper puts Hustvedt’s notions of self into communication with interpretations of hysteria as a disease affixed to a femininity allegedly characterized by impressionability, susceptibility, and a lack of moral agency.

Author's Bio: Christine Marks was born in Essen in 1977. She is currently a PhD student at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. Her thesis deals with intersubjective identity constellations in philosophy, art, and medicine in the works of Siri Hustvedt. She wrote her master’s thesis about deconstruction in the works of Paul Auster. She taught American literature and culture at the Department of English and Linguistics in Mainz until March 2009 and is about to finish her dissertation with the help of a stipend granted by the Sibylle-Kalkhof-Rose foundation. She also worked as an instructor of Business English for two language schools in Mainz from June 2006 to March 2009. She received her education in Mainz, Sacramento, and New York City. In Sacramento she worked as a teaching assistant at the German department of CSUS, and in New York City she was a research assistant at the English department of Columbia University. Her research interests include gender studies, food and identity, literature and medicine, intersubjectivity, and deconstruction. She is now living in New York City.

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