What Difference Does that Make to a Med?” The Sensory and Social Regimes of the Dissecting Room at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania

Dados Bibliográficos

ID16103993
AutoresJessica Leigh Hester (Johns Hopkins University, autor correspondente)
Ano2026
Volume117
Fascículo1
Páginas74-97
Data de publicação2026-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoIsis (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/739470
OpenAlexW7129278470
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas26

Nineteenth-century American medical education was shaped by constrictive norms of the world beyond hospitals and schools. During their training, female students negotiated that cinching both relationally and within their own bodies. At the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, teachers and students imposed classed, gendered, and racialized notions onto the bodies of dissectors and corpses. Examining four autobiographical texts by women who attended the school, I argue that dissecting room experiences were foundational and transformative for women’s relationships and indoctrination into doctoring, as students cultivated what I term the “anatomo affect.” Analyzing dissection through the lens of sensation, I suggest that by fleeing before feeling faint, steeling themselves against the “ickiness” of smells and tactile encounters, perhaps participating in body trafficking, and ultimately by surveilling and policing affect, students tried to reconcile sometimes-contradictory imperatives of unflappability and “femininity” while forging identities as doctors and women

Complicity · Feeling · Indoctrination · Transformative learning · Wonder · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History of Emotions Research