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

Bibliographic Data

ID16103993
AuthorsJessica Leigh Hester (Johns Hopkins University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume117
Issue1
Pages74-97
Publication date2026-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIsis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/739470
OpenAlexW7129278470
LanguageEN
References cited26

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