Editorial
1This 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).
We constantly tell stories, listen to them, and watch them. Our human experiences, including those we tell to our doctors, are the stuff of narrative. Narrative, then, is the way we make sense of the world. As the clinical narrative tells us much about the patient’s illness, so the way we tell our history of medical ideas and practices indicates a great deal about how we perceive ourselves as an occupational group, as a profession, as healers. (Brieger 406)
The relationship between reader and text – on both levels – is embedded in the gender matrix of a given context. Furthermore, Susan Sontag’s analysis of the ways in which illnesses are used as metaphors to express social, political, moral, or cultural crises offers fruitful ground for discussion.
2When I sent out this call for papers for a special issue of the journal gender forum with the specific focus on the interfaces of literature, gender, and medicine earlier this year, I never expected so much interest. Within a few days, I received far more than 30 proposals as well as e-mails stating people’s interest in the topic and asking whether I would let them know when the issue would be available online. The proposals covered a wide variety of questions addressing the overarching theme. Soon I realized that the possible contributions mostly fell into the three categories of historical accounts of women (doctors) in medicine (with an emphasis on the nineteenth century) (cf. Abram; Furst, “From Speculation to Science”; Morantz-Sanchez; More), literary representations of women – both doctors and patients – in medicine and doctor-patient relationships (cf. Bassuk; Bauer; Blackie; Browner; Burns; Furst, “Halfway Up the Hill”; Masteller; Swenson), and personal narratives of illness (cf. Hawkins). Because of the large number of interesting and well written proposals, the general editors of the journal agreed on accepting two separate issues with one focus on history and literature and one on personal narratives.
3 This first issue consists of six original articles covering a variety of approaches, however, concentrating on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and transcending national borders from the United States via England to France, Switzerland, and Germany. Two historical case studies of women in medicine in nineteenth-century U.S. America are accompanied by one article on the representation of women doctors in German literature of the same time, and by three articles on women and madness in literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries intersecting in the nineteenth century.
4 James Alsop’s discussion of the historical Dr. Annie Alexander (1864-1929) from Charlotte, NC, is an example of the intersection of history, literature, and medicine. Alsop first introduces Dr. Alexander’s biography to his readers as probably the first woman graduate of a medical college to practice in the American South. He then includes an unpublished and evidently autobiographical short story written by Dr. Alexander about a young woman doctor in the South (“Doctor Katherine”), and proceeds to analyze the story which Dr. Alexander, as Alsop suggests, wrote in order to present to young readers a positive example of a woman’s career in medicine. Interestingly, in this story, one of the major obstacles for women doctors – the institution of marriage – can ultimately be reconciled with a medical career since the man Dr. Katherine is in love with is also a doctor and invites her both to marry him and join him as a doctor in his practice.
5Meredith Eliassen’s contribution changes the focus from the American South to the San Francisco of the same time frame – the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Like Dr. Alexander in Charlotte, NC, Eliassen’s case studies of two women doctors – Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown (1846-1904) and her daughter Dr. Adelaide Brown (1867-1940) – show how they mostly treated women and children, supported or even founded hospitals for women and children, and, in these specific cases, worked to reduce the health hazards in both breast and bottle feeding of children. The Brown doctors were instrumental in significantly lowering the infant mortality rate, promoting child welfare, and enhancing quality education for medical practitioners.