Out of the Dead House
Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10039211 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Deborah Kuhn McGregor (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, corresponding author), Susan Well (0000-0001-5914-9350), Susan Wells |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 89 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 652 |
| Publication date | 2002-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3092238 |
| OpenAlex | W2796774629 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
From a twentieth-century perspective, one of the most unexpected activities of Martha Bal-lard, a late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century midwife in frontier Maine, was her participation with local physicians in performing autopsies, even that of one of her own relatives who was in many ways a daughter to her. In her book, Susan Wells uses medical dissection as a factor with which to explore the history of nineteenth-century women physicians in the United States. Her book interprets the texts of women physicians, defining them as key historical documents. As part of feminist gender analysis, the methodology in the book reflects a postmodernist emphasis on language and uses the rhetorical and textual strategy of the deictic system to search for gender in medical writings, from theses of medical students to clinical records, speeches, and published documents. Relying on Regina Morantz-Sanchez's previous histories, particularly Sympathy and Science (1985), for context, Wells chooses to trace her interpretation almost entirely through sources that give voice to women practitioners and clarify their medical knowledge and approach to science. Her period is the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. In chapter 4 Wells concludes that there was no inherent or essentialist difference between men and women practitioners but that varieties of gendered techniques appeared in diverse sources describing the patient-physician relationship and the meaning and role of science
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Frontier · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Memoir · Period (music · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Sympathy · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Medical History and Innovations · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,15 |
| Citation span | 2006 - 2021 (16) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |