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Scholarship in Victorian Women and Medicine: An Overview
Author(s) -
Swenson Kristine
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12066
Subject(s) - scholarship , rhetoric , sociology , field (mathematics) , feminism , victorian era , history , social science , gender studies , literature , political science , law , art , philosophy , linguistics , mathematics , pure mathematics
Since the mid‐1980s, scholars in the history of medicine, social history, women's studies, rhetoric, and literary/cultural studies have all recognized that women and medicine came together in particularly interesting ways in the nineteenth century. Between 1985 and 1990, feminists from across the disciplines drew upon a disparate array of more traditional scholarship to produce books that laid the groundwork for studies on Victorian women and medicine, books whose claims are still being tested and spun out in new scholarship. But although scholars in these various fields have borrowed liberally from one another's work, their critical assumptions and methodologies are often quite different. This essay provides an overview of the scholarship in Victorian women and medicine over the past several decades and suggests how the best recent work in the field attempts to achieve true interdisciplinarity.