In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78.2 (2004) 492-493



[Access article in PDF]
Nathan Stormer. Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002. xvi + 233 pp. Ill. $70.00 (cloth, 0-7391-0429-2); $22.95 (paperbound, 0-7391-0430-6).

Articulating Life's Memory is not a history of abortion; and in spite of its title, it is not actually a history of abortion rhetoric. In general terms, in the author's words, it is a study of the "performative rhetorical work of medical practices" (p. xii) in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, during the early years of medical opposition to abortion. Specifically, Nathan Stormer's goal is to "frame abortion opposition as a restorative rhetoric that attempted to counteract white women's perceived estrangement from their maternal duty. The memory of that duty, or the recollection of lost knowledge, was articulated through medical knowledge" (p. 23).

For feminist historians of reproduction who over the past decade or so have articulated a quite different history of the relationship between women (as patients and subjects) and their physicians, one in which power and influence shift and merge, this book's conclusions, if not its style, represent a return to a simpler historiography. Asserting that abortion rhetoric "reproduced" the "white patriarchal ideology," Stormer contends that it also "symbolically, materially, and spatially . . . helped rhetorically constitute the order of white Victorian gender ideology" (p. 147, italics in original). The book's six chapters build upon the author's overall argument that antiabortion rhetoric was a medical attempt to [End Page 492] ensure that (white) women remained in their domestic sphere, to bind new scientific discoveries to a conventional view of gender roles, and to ensure the literal reproduction of white Victorian culture.

If I have correctly interpreted his intentions, Stormer does not propose that Articulating Life's Memory be viewed literally as a work of history, but rather as a rhetorician's assessment of the significance of nineteenth-century antiabortion medical rhetoric in creating cultural memory. Or, as the author puts it, this book "is a materialist history of the reformulation, within a specific context, of a rhetorical commonplace: to reproduce is to remember ourselves" (p. xv). His work will be of interest in particular to those interested in the disciplinary perspective of rhetoric and theory as applied to the history of abortion, and perhaps more broadly, to the history of nineteenth-century attitudes about women and reproduction.


Rutgers University—Camden


...

pdf

Share