Abstract

Abstract:

This article engages new materialism and the history of medicine to analyze how malaria shaped Caroline Kirkland's Western canon—A New Home, Who'll Follow; or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), Forest Life (1842), and Western Clearings (1845). Her works' inconsistent perspective on gender, class, and the West are not a product of poor writing, Eastern elitism, or even nascent feminism, as many critics contend, but the result of her malarial region and of malaria itself. Malaria's symptoms, including cycling fevers, relapses, and limited immunity, transformed Kirkland's regionalism as it transformed individual bodies. Examining her vacillating representations of women doctors, this article contends that the ague highlights the importance of medical women in the West even when Kirkland herself aims to denigrate them. It contributes an ecocritical understanding of regionalism, while also expanding our understanding of nineteenth-century healing by considering both the human and nonhuman beings who produced medical knowledge.

pdf

Share