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2 books match the query 'Doctoring'

cover of Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Doctoring the Novel

Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Ohio University Press, 2012

If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.
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cover of Doctoring the West: Women Physicians and the Politics and Practice of Medicine

Doctoring the West

Women Physicians and the Politics and Practice of Medicine

Jacqueline D. Antonovich

Rutgers University Press, 2027

In the late nineteenth century, women physicians began migrating to the American West in remarkable numbers. Drawn by early suffrage laws and a booming population of health seekers, they settled across states such as California, Colorado, and Oregon—places where they might finally practice medicine and participate in politics as full and equal citizens. Over the next several decades, these women became central figures in shaping the region's health landscape. They built hospitals and clinics, championed public health reform, and positioned themselves at the center of the era's defining debates over birth control, abortion, and eugenics. Their legacy is as complex as it is consequential. Doctoring the West tells the stories of these women: the power they wielded, the choices they made, the people they cared for—and those they harmed. Their work transformed the health of the American West and defined the medical politics of the nation.

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