Editors' column

Women, health, literature, and medicine form a constellation of concepts whose various combinations have sparked considerable scholarship, debate, and action over the past quarter of a century. Women have challenged all dimensions of personal and public life that these words evoke. In medicine and literature, women’s presence and contributions have broadened the scope of both fields.

In the late ‘60s, feminist literary scholars began to speak and write about the paucity of texts by women authors being taught and the marginal, stereotypical roles of many women characters in literature written by men. This work led to a search for lost or forgotten works by women and a closer critique of the representation of women by male authors. As this scholarship became established, scholars turned to even less traditional texts, such as diaries and oral histories, to learn more about the reality of women’s lives. This scholarship, though, did not take entirely into account the complexity of oppression. Scholars were challenged to rethink oppression in terms of the different experiences of poor women, women of color, lesbians, indigenous, and immigrant women. Feminist scholars have begun to recognize that they are members of a world community—and to grapple with the implications of that membership.

Similarly, in medicine, debates over abortion and birth control opened the door to public questioning of who defines and controls women’s health. From this first awareness of the virtual absence of women in the design and delivery of health care, women enlarged their critique of medicine to challenge the ways a medical establishment dominated by male values has controlled such aspects of women’s health as breast cancer, heart disease, depression, access to health care, clinical trials, and domestic violence. Women founded such organizations as the Boston Women’s Health Collective, whose widely read Our Bodies, Ourselves repositioned women as empowered health-care consumers and providers. In challenging the medicalization of many aspects of women’s lives, women shifted attention from illness to health, treatment to prevention, medical authority to doctor-patient partnership. As literary scholars began to see women’s writing in a global context, so, too, women’s health is being redefined as a worldwide issue.

These developments in literature and medicine did not, of course, occur quite so smoothly or distinctly. Moreover, they did not occur in a vacuum. The work of men as well as women in related fields such as bioethics, public health, popular culture, social history, and critical theory frequently intersects with feminist studies and women’s health. The essays in this special issue of Literature and Medicine, coming after more than twenty-five years of (r)evolution, cannot be categorized by any one of the developments we have outlined above but usually include several approaches to their subject. All of the essays demonstrate the necessarily interdisciplinary and inclusive nature of this work.

The first three essays printed here combine historical and literary analysis and are classic examples of the study of women as both authors and subjects. Sheila Shaw, in “Spontaneous Combustion and the Sectioning of Female Bodies,” examines popular beliefs about spontaneous combustion in eighteenth-century Britain. Shaw connects the gruesome, macabre medical descriptions of charred, elderly, gin-drinking women with the misogynist, scatological verse of eighteenth-century male poets. Both sets of texts, Shaw argues, could only have been possible in a society that devalued—even despised—women. Joining historical with literary analysis, examining both literary and extra-literary texts, Shaw’s essay demonstrates the diverse methods of feminist scholarship.

Jennifer Shaddock, in “Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing as Survival Memoir,” also situates her argument in a social milieu that narrowly circumscribed women’s worth. Shaddock employs a revisionist method as well, turning to forgotten and little-read works to reconsider the legend of Florence Nightingale. She traces a shift in the rhetoric and style of Nightingale’s writing as she fought to have her philosophy and method of nursing accepted at a time when nurses were ill-trained, unorganized, and disrespected. Without lessening the importance of Nightingale’s contribution to nursing, Shaddock discovers Nightingale’s ambivalence about female power and...