Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (review)

Kristine Swenson's illuminating and well-researched study examines the intersection of fiction, medical women, and feminism within Victorian culture. Victorian journalism is a steady undercurrent in her book, and Swenson cites a range of periodicals (e.g., the Times, Lancet, Atlantic Monthly, India's Christian College Magazine) as well as analyzing the larger role of journalism in shaping public attitudes toward female doctors and nurses and their fictional portrayals.

As Swenson argues, "Nightingale did not become a national heroine, and the Lady with the Lamp a cultural icon, because she and her nurses saved lives in the Crimea. Rather, Nightingale's status as heroine grew out of a complex of discourses that came together around the war and its rhetoric," including reform, technology, the ability of "the daily press to shape public opinion and the cultural imagination," and gender ideology (36). Swenson keeps this complex discursivity in view throughout Medical Women. If the Times constructed an image of the nurturing, pure, self-sacrificing nurse based on middle-class femininity, as Chapter 1 details, Swenson suggests that reading Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853) may have helped inspire Nightingale's Scutari campaign in the first place. In Ruth, an innocent, orphaned working-class girl is seduced and abandoned, rescued and passed off as a respectable middle-class widow, then exposed, after which she serves as professional nurse during a cholera epidemic; she survives the communal epidemic but dies sacrificially after nursing her seducer. As Swenson astutely notes, the conflation of pure heroine, professional nurse, and fallen woman in Ruth adumbrates the cultural representation of medical women throughout the century. Not only did fictional women (like some real-life counterparts) deliver medical care to fallen women, but professional women's unconventional roles, close connection to the body, and intimate working relationships with male professionals also elicited anxieties about their own sexuality. Hence representation of nurses bifurcated into angelic heroines and monstrous villains in succeeding fiction, pornography, and film.

Swenson also attends closely to medical developments and deftly places Gaskell, Nightingale, and Crimean-inspired fiction in the context of anti-contagion theory, a case of class bias parading as science. Anti-contagion theory maintained that working-class filth (material and moral) generated disease, whereas morally pure, middle-class caregivers could minister to the sick without harm. Clearly gender, sexuality, and class were inseparable from representations of medical women in fiction, the press, and science, as Swenson's analysis of a Harper's Magazine short story and Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago (1857), which featured a cholera epidemic and romance between a doctor and his pure nurse, also indicates.

Chapter 2 examines the monstrous nurses of two 1860s sensation novels, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and Hard Cash by Charles Reade, in the context of backlash against the pure Crimean nurse and newspaper coverage of sensational trials involving a nurse-poisoner and -bigamist. Chapter 3 reviews the discrimination met by women seeking training as doctors and ensuing public debates before turning to the issues of fair play and women's sexuality in Charles Reade's A Woman-Hater, serialized in Blackwood's (1876-1877) and the Atlantic Monthly (1877), and Conan Doyle's "The Doctors of Hoyland" (1894), plus a cluster of American novels that help Swenson tease out what was specific to British portrayals. Chapter 4 discusses at length the most positive treatment of a medical woman in Swenson's study, Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), by physician Margaret Todd, the protégé and domestic partner of Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake (on whom Charles Reade based Dr. Rhoda Gale in A Woman-Hater). Since Todd suggests that women are entitled to professional training and careers and that this work does not unfit them for marriage, Mona Maclean fuses New Woman and medical romance plots, unusually imparting to the former a happy ending and to the latter progressive feminist politics. Alongside Todd's novel Swenson sets Dr. Janet of Harley Street (1893) by physician Arabella...