Women in Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century - Volume IV: Patient Perspectives

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.Table of ContentVolume IV – Patient Perspectives Volume IV - Introduction 1. Jessie C. Farmer, ‘Shall Female Physicians Treat Male Patients’, California Medical Journal, 9 (1888), pp. 462-464. 2. J. William White, The Supposed Curative Effect of Operations Per Se, reprinted from Annals of Surgery, 14.2 and 14.3 (August and September 1891), pp. 81-119, 161-198. 3. ‘The New Hospital for Women, and What Mrs Brown Saw There. By Her Neighbour’, Queen, 10 (September 1892), pp. 62-63. 4. ‘Medicine. An Eminent Lady Doctor’, in Professional Women Upon Their Professions. Conversations Recorded by Margaret Bateson (London: Horace Cox, 1895), pp. 28-31. 5. May Thorne, ‘The After-Effects of Abdominal Section’, British Medical Journal, 1:988 (4 February 1899), pp. 264-265. 6. ‘The Gentlewoman’s Opinion: On the Lady Doctor’, Gentlewoman (19 October 1907), p. 20. 7. Selected Contributions from Dr X.Y.Z., ‘Talks with the Doctor’, Woman Worker, August-December 1908: 7 August, p. 266; 14 August, p. 290; 21 August, pp. 314; 28 August, p. 340; 4 September, p. 364; 11 September, p. 388; 18 September, p. 406; 25 September, p. 436; 2 October, p. 456; 9 October, p. 480; 16 October, p. 505; 23 October, p. 528; 4 November, p. 576; 11 November, p. 600; 18 November, p. 631; 25 November, p. 650; 2 December, p. 672; 9 December, p. 703; 16 December, p. 723; 23 December, p. 747. 8. ‘New Jersey’, in The Tree of Knowledge. A Document by a Woman (New York: Stuyvesant Press, 1908), pp. 216-228. 9. Ethel Vaughan-Sawyer, ‘The Patient’, London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women Magazine, 7:48 (March 1911), pp. 350-358. 10. [Alice Beatty], Medical Tyranny: A Personal Experience (self-published, 1912). 11. Antonio de Navarro, The Scottish Women’s Hospital at the French Abbey of Royaumont (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1917), pp. 187-211. 12. Lady Frances Balfour, Elsie Inglis (London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), pp. 59-81, 111-136. IndexBiographical NoteDr Claire Brock is Associate Professor in the School of Arts at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research interests are in the history of science and medicine, with a focus on women’s place within these domains during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.