Women In Medicine In The Long Nineteenth Century

"This four-volume collection explores medical women as a global phenomenon during the long nineteenth century through primary sources. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this title will be of great interest to students of Women's History and the History of Medicine"--

The volume explores the range of reactions to medical women from the mid-nineteenth century up until the start of the Great War in 1914. By covering this period, readers will be introduced to ongoing debates surrounding women in medicine, via sources which explore the possibilities for – as well as the problems of – female professional practice. The perspectives of detractors and supporters, as well as medical women themselves, are taken into account, and especial consideration given to opinions which were not neatly divided along gender lines. Of key concern here is a nuanced tracing through primary material of changes in the perception of medical women, as well as the ways in which lingering prejudices disappeared or remained well into the twentieth century. This volume focuses on two key areas: first, the debates and challenges around medical and surgical education for women; and, second, women’s physical and mental ‘fitness’ to practise. The reproduction of previously unpublished student magazines, both from the foundational London School of Medicine for Women, as well as medical schools which considered admitting women during this period, are an original feature of this volume. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this title will be of great interest to students of Women's History and the History of Medicine.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries between domestic and fine art production, they crafted subjectivities for themselves as creative workers. By bringing together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and contested nature of the female artistic professional was a notable aspect of debates about aesthetic value and the impact of industrial technologies. All the essays in this volume set up a productive inter-art dialogue that complicates conventional binary divisions such as amateur and professional, public and private, artistry and industry in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender, artistic labour and creativity in the period. Ultimately, how women faced the pragmatics of their own creative labour as they pursued vocations, trades and professions in the literary marketplace and related art-industries reveals the different ideological positions surrounding the transition of women from industrious amateurism to professional artistry.

Vital to the acceptance of medical women was the willingness of patients – largely women and children – to be treated by them. By the end of 1914, this more usual patient base was expanded to include injured soldiers. To provide a full consideration of the medical and surgical world of this period, it is necessary to explore patients in order to explore how gender affected the relationship between patient and practitioner. This volume examines the contemporary fear that hospital patients, mostly of working-class origin, were being experimented upon by their overly eager, ambitious, and vivisecting doctors; something in which surgeons especially were seen to be complicit. Women too, however, carried out abdominal and gynaecological surgery, and performed clitoridectomies. How medical women justified their actions, as well as how their patients viewed them, is the focus of this volume. Additionally, the voice of those who experienced ‘medical tyranny’ is considered to examine what happened when patients fought back publicly against the medical establishment. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this title will be of great interest to students of Women's History and the History of Medicine.

This volume explores medical women as a global phenomenon during the long nineteenth century. The volume considers, firstly, how especially British medical women travelled internationally to treat patients who, for reasons of religious, cultural, or social beliefs, were reluctant to seek treatment from male doctors. In this instance, missionary zeal was balanced with concern for women’s health and welfare. Secondly, the volume includes texts written by those who qualified as medical women and practised either in their national context or those educated abroad, who then returned home to pursue their careers. The latter makes more widely available works by women of colour, including, for example, the African American woman doctor, Rebecca Lee Crumpler, and Indian female medical practitioner, Rukhmabai. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this title will be of great interest to students of Women's History and the History of Medicine.