Women Healers & Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill ed. by Lilian R. Furst (review)

comments on the Squire's death: "So the old gentleman's fidgetiness and low spirits, which made him send for Arthur in that sudden way, really meant something" (Chapter 40). Nothing to do with the Poysers. As for concealing Arthur's role in the catastrophe, Irwine as his friend and father-substitute does indeed show more sympathy with Arthur than many ofthe other inhabitants ofHayslope do. But the narrator also records Irwine's agreement that Adam's demand for Arthur to be exposed is "just," and adds that Irwine believes exposure inevitable: "it was scarcely to be supposed that Hetty would persist to the end in her obstinate silence" (Chapter 40). Sutherland's point is that given the 1 799- 1800 setting oíAdam Bede, the Squire and the Parson might be concerned about revolutionary sentiments slippingacross the Channel even as far as Hayslope, and that the Parson fears public exposure of Arthur at Hetty's trial might taint the "whole English squirearchy, and the complex mutual fealties which go with it." But the novel gives no evidence that even the neighbors of Hayslope who sympathize with the Poysers are upset at Arthur's deception ofhis "loyal retainer" perse (i.e., Adam)—even ifthey would blink, as Sutherland suggests, at "rogering peasant girls." Other essays provoke other disputes with Sutherland's interpretations, but they also bring attention to the cultural context for fiction (including also Fanny Hill's condoms and Mrs. Dalloway's taxi), the impact ofpublishing practices on authors' composition practices (Amelia Sedley's pianos or the idiosyncrasies of time in Barchester Towers), and other critical questions. And they remind us that criticism need not be dull orjargon-ridden. As Sutherland's reception in the U.K. shows, it can even be popular. While Sutherland and Cohen approach literary criticism rather differently, the works ofboth testify to the pleasures ofthe text. % Lilian R. Fürst, Ed. Women Healers &Physicians: Climbinga Long Hill. Lexington: The University Press ofKentucky, 1997. 274p. Ann Owens Weekes University of Arizona This eclectic, wide-ranging collection ofessays, drawing from medical texts and literature, charts the uphill struggle of women physicians from medieval and Renaissance Europe to nineteenth/twentieth-century Britain, the United States, and Australia. Divided into two parts, the first concentrating on the relationship between religion, magic, and medicine, and the second on the emergence of 76 « ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW « SPRING 1998 Book Reviews professionalism in the nineteenth century, the collection does not attempt an historical overview, but chronicles outstanding, often neglected, examples ofthe struggles faced by individual women physicians and women physicians in general, as a result ofchurch, state, and educational restrictions which formed the basis of social and cultural prejudice against women doctors. Referring to accounts of individual women healers and remedies in early medical manuals, Debra L. Stoudt illustrates the changing role ofthe church and of women healers in medieval Germany in the first essay. Disease not being understood, its treatment was largely the church's realm in the early middle ages, and medical accounts show men and women alike treating illness with charms and herbs. However, Stoudt notes that Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1 179) is the only woman whose knowledge ofmedicine is undisputed and well documented. With the establishment ofuniversities, and the licensing ofhealers, women were excluded from an equal role in medicine, but Stoudt asserts that women's own changing spirituality also played a part: the late middle ages saw illness as a punishment or trial from God, acceptance ofwhich brought one closer to Him. Illustrating the marginalization ofwomen as healers, Stoudt's essay sets the stage for the next four, which examine women's role in relation to medicine in medieval and Renaissance texts. Nancy R Nenno's well-supported essay argues that widespread ambivalence to the woman healer, a necessary figure in caring for the poor, was based on the source of the healer's power; women's healing relied on littleunderstood herbs and could thus be linked to magic. This suspicion ofwomen's power, at a time when the state began intervening in medicine, is, she asserts, the basis ofthe ambivalent portraits ofFeimurgan and Queen Isot in Hartmann's Erec (1 180/1 185) and...