Fictional Medical Women and Moral Therapy in the Late-Nineteenth Century: Daughters of Aesculapius, Mothers to All

In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, a small but significant group of women fought for, and won, the right to study and practice medicine alongside men in Britain.¹ Individual women such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson were the first to break into the British medical profession in 1859 and 1865 respectively. Building on their efforts, Sophia Jex-Blake led the struggle to gain access to medical education in Great Britain, initially campaigning with six other women for admission to the medical school at the University of Edinburgh in 1869 and, with Blackwell and Anderson, cofounding the London Medical School for Women in 1874. Thanks to the efforts of these early medical women and their supporters, an Enabling Act was passed by Parliament in 1877 to allow women to be licensed as physicians in Great Britain by the British Medical Association (BMA); at the same time, the King's and Queen's College of Physicians of Ireland began accepting women on its register, effectively giving them the same privileges as afforded by the BMA. By 1912, Abraham Flexner reported that out of a total of approximately 40,000 doctors listed on the British Medical Register, 600 were women.² That there were even that many women doctors was seen as a tremendous victory by some; but, to conservative observers concerned about the effects of women's emancipation on the fabric of society, those few hundred female physicians were a source of outraged alarm.

The resultant controversy surrounding women's claim to increased professional authority frequently took written form within both the medical and popular presses, where it became part of the period's larger conflict over the Woman Question. And the subject of the medical woman was found not only in nonfictional essays; the cause of the "doctress"

Despite being regarded as unconventional, even unwomanly, pioneer women doctors such as Elizabeth Blackwell tended to hold conservative views on social issues, reflected here in this cover illustration.

also engaged the attention of a handful of novelists, who used their genre as an imaginative testing ground to invent and explore the parameters of professional medical life for women.³

While not all of the doctress novels lend unconditional support to the medical woman, the majority perform deliberate work to link the fictional to the historical, using the entertainment value of the literary text to attract readers to quasi-propagandistic content. Most of the novels use the fictional woman doctor to exemplify the late-Victorian feminist ideal of the educated female professional. Such a figure is no threat to womanhood, these authors suggest, but is instead presented as one of its most worthy embodiments, combining the familiar attributes of femininity with a high degree of medical competence. Many of the novels that endorse a medical career for women do so in reference to the conventions of heterosexual romance—medicine is either shown to be compatible with romance, provided the New Woman can find, or make, a suitably "New" Man; or it is presented as a noble outlet for the doctress's womanly energies in place of marriage.

However, while few novels go far past the constraints of the romance genre, several do make an attempt to offer "a reworking of citizenship along gendered, moral lines"⁴ by envisioning a professional scope for the woman doctor that encompasses not only the domestic and maternal, but also the moral, patriotic, imperial, and racial. A selection of these novels shows the range of variation available for such portrayals: in works such as Peace with Honour (Sydney Grier [Hilda Gregg], 1897), Elizabeth Glen MB (Annie S. Swan, 1895), Mona Maclean, Medical Student (Graham Travers [Margaret Todd], 1898), A Woman Hater (Charles Reade, 1877), and Dr. Janet of Harley Street (Arabella Kenealy, 1893), the medical woman represents a kind of rational yet essential femininity that gently but irresistibly enlightens all who come in its path.⁵ The goal of the novels in this regard is to persuade readers to modify...