Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America

3. Educating the Public: Women Physicians’ Popular Health Advice

69 s 3 Educating the Public: Women Physicians’ Popular Health Advice Woman—God’s best gift to man and the chief support of the doctors. —the annual toast at medical conventions, quoted in Anna M. Galbraith, Hygiene and Physical Culture for Women (1895) As soon as nineteenth-century women physicians began learning anatomy and physiology, they felt it was their duty to share that information with the public, particularly with other women. Health lectures by women physicians were very popular in the mid- and late 1800s, so popular that many, including Elizabeth Blackwell and Anna M. Longshore-Potts, published their lectures for wider distribution. Health information lectures and texts were a means of fulfilling women physicians’ promise to connect the professional medical community with the domestic feminine sphere. Blackwell acknowledged this promise in 1852 when she described her published lectures as “the first fruits of [her] medical studies,” which she provided “as an earnest of future work” (Laws of Life n. pag.). For these women, the work of a physician—particularly a woman physician—involved rhetoric and education as much as it involved medicine and surgery. In 1860, Elizabeth and her sister Emily, who followed her into medicine, described a woman physician’s primary duty as health instruction: “As teachers . . . to diffuse among women the physiological and sanitary knowledge which they need, we find the first work for women physicians” (10). Indeed, for some women physicians, health lectures served to fill their time and their pockets in the early years of their practices, when people were reluctant to put themselves under a woman’s care. 70 Educating the Public Nineteenth-century women physicians’ health information and advice books often reached broader audiences than women physicians could reach through their lectures or their practices. For some readers, such books represented their first interactions with a woman physician. Without firsthand knowledge of women physicians, readers must have relied on other cues to determine the ethos of the woman physician health writer. Some cues circulated in the popular media, such as this passage from a book published anonymously in Philadelphia in 1870: “It is clear that the female medical ranks must be filled by the disappointed, or the falsely ambitious; the weak-minded or the wrong-minded” (Men and Women Medical Students: The Hospital Clinics and the Woman Movement 16). Countering such negative portrayals were the ethos cues provided by the health information and advice genre itself. In a discussion of genres as responses to recurrent rhetorical situations, Carolyn Miller explains the effect genre has on audience: “Form shapes the response of the reader or listener to substance by providing instruction, so to speak, about how to perceive and interpret; this guidance disposes the audience to anticipate, to be gratified, to respond in a certain way. Seen thus, form becomes a kind of meta-information, with both semantic value (as information) and syntactic (or formal) value” (159). The instructive aspect of genre is particularly relevant to nineteenth-century women physicians’ health information and advice texts: although readers might have been unfamiliar with and wary of women physicians, the writers’ decision to publish in the genre of the health information book positioned women physicians as experts educating and advising the less informed. Predisposed by the genre to respond to the author as expert adviser, readers might have acquired an attitude toward women physicians that countered the negative caricatures circulated by opponents. In this chapter, I explore how the nineteenth-century American women physicians who wrote health information and advice texts taught readers to perceive them as feminine professionals. After first describing the genre conventions and other common features of health information and advice texts, I demonstrate that women physicians used these conventions to assert their professional authority and their femininity simultaneously. Although the characteristics associated with professionalism and femininity evolved over the course of the century, both components of women physicians’ ethos would be necessary if female readers were to accept them as health advisers. Relying on and adapting the genre of the health information and advice book, women physicians were authorized to inform their readers and to encourage them to be healthy, autonomous individuals who valued their own bodies enough to care for themselves properly. 71 Educating the Public The texts examined here represent a range of therapeutic schools, including regular, water-cure, botanical, and eclectic medicine, but all were intended to educate readers, primarily women, about human anatomy and physiology...