Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments Nineteenth-century women physicians could be a sociable group; working on their writing put me in touch with new and hospitable worlds of medical history and medical archives and confirmed my connections with rhetoricians and compositionists. Karyn Hollis’s chance remark that she would love to see the materials at the Medical College of Pennsylvania’s archives prompted me to visit there; Theresa Taylor, most patient of archivists, gave me a list of basic historical books and put Hannah Longshore’s papers into my hands. I owe immense debts to her and her successors at the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine, especially Barbara Williams, who sustained the archive through a chaotic period in the history of the college and who supplied me richly from its immense resources. This book has also bene fited from the help of archivists and librarians at the Friends Historical Library, the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, the Historic Library of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the Thomas Jefferson University Archives , the Quaker Collection of the Haverford College Library, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the Historical Library at the National Library of Medicine in Washington, D.C., the Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Temple University Urban Archives, and the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University. In using these archival materials, I preserved original spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Participants at academic conferences asked especially useful questions about this project. I am grateful to the College Composition and Communication Conference, the Pennsylvania State University Conference on Composition and Rhetoric, the Wayne State University American Studies Colloquium , the Wood Seminars in the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the American Association for the History of Medicine , the Modern Language Association, the Kent State English Graduate Organization, and the Partial Bodies Conference sponsored by graduate students in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The ques- xii Acknowledgments tions and comments of James Bono and Gretchen Worden have been especially memorable and welcome. The University of Pennsylvania Workshop in the History and Sociology of Science and Technology offered me a benchmark for rigorous reflection on the aims of science studies. And I owe a more sustained debt to the students and auditors in my seminar Feminist Rhetorics of Science and to Robert Caserio, who complied with my unreasonable request for a late change of seminar topic. My colleagues in rhetoric and composition at Temple University—Eli Goldblatt, Dennis Lebofsky, Arabella Lyon, Frank Sullivan, and Steve Parks—tolerated my urgent requests to look at the latest gruesome pictures. Sally Mitchell and Miles Orvell told me things about archival work that I should have learned in graduate school. Maurice Vogel and Gretchen Condon, scholars in the history and sociology of medicine at Temple, helped me locate my work in relation to those challenging and fascinating fields. Steven Peitzman, author of A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and the Medical College of Pennsylvania (Rutgers University Press, 2000), a critically important history of the Woman’s Medical College, and Michael Sappol, author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America, a compelling account of dissection and the formation of American medicine (Princeton University Press, 2001), have been generous and helpful colleagues; I have gained immeasurably from dialogue with them. All errors are my own. I am grateful for support from Temple University, especially a Summer Research Grant, two Grants-in-Aid of Research, and a Research and Study Leave, without which I would not have finished this book. I owe special thanks to Mary Elizabeth Braun and to the University of Wisconsin Press referees, whose advice has been invaluable, and to Rachel Bright, who did final proofreading. The lines on the dedication page are from Anne Sexton’s “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman.” Finally, I am grateful to Hugh Grady, and to Laura Rose Grady and Constance Claire Grady, for their love and support, and for the “large liberty” that sustained this book. Out of the Dead House ...