Comment

The Editors recently received a letter from Monica Green, co-signed by eighty-seven other historians, regarding the review by John Scarborough of Rebecca Flemming's Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Bull. Hist. Med., 2003, 77(4): 941-42). Although the Bulletin does not publish responses to book reviews, the editors believe that the issue raised by Professor Green is important and deserves airing in these pages. We are therefore publishing both the letter and Professor Scarborough's reply.

We write to you regarding a book review that recently appeared in the Bulletin. The review, written by John Scarborough, was an extraordinarily laudatory assessment of Rebecca Flemming's Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and it may well seem odd that such a positive review could elicit any criticism.

Our concern lies not with the review as a whole, but simply one passage in it that was both erroneous in its depiction of Dr. Flemming's work and disparaging of one large (and growing) sector of the scholarly community. Dr. Scarborough writes: "Flemming's Medicine is so chock full of substance, so comprehensive in its command of the texts, and so meticulous in the careful conclusions reached, that one cannot label this volume as 'feminist' by any definition" (p. 942).

We found this a stunning claim: first, because Dr. Flemming herself situates her work in a larger tradition of feminist scholarship (pp. 3-4, 6-7, and particularly p. 24 where Flemming explicitly claims that she has adopted the feminist analyses of Joan Scott and Judith Butler for her guiding understanding of gender); and second, because of its implications for a wider body of scholarship in history.

Obviously, different scholars define "feminist" in a variety of ways, but we know of no one who defines it as the absence of substance, the failure to be comprehensive in the command of historical sources, nor in the lack of meticulousness in the drawing of conclusions. To be sure, these are [End Page 876] [Begin Page 878] high standards and it remains a challenge for scholars of all interpretive stripes to meet them as well as Dr. Flemming has done. But we feel Dr. Scarborough, in making this comment, shows himself to be quite ignorant of what the definition of "feminist scholarship" is.

We regret that there was no challenging of this statement during the editorial process. Naturally, we acknowledge the right of all review authors to express their opinion, but straight-out misrepresentation is not, as we understand it, part of that right. Nevertheless, we also feel this can serve as the occasion for a "teaching moment." Several among the signatories plan to write an essay review that will summarize the contributions feminist perspectives have made to the field of medical history over the course of the last decades. We hope this will contribute to a more engaged and respectful acknowledgment of the different theoretical perspectives that have contributed and continue to contribute to our field.

Monica Green, of Arizona State University, has agreed to serve as the contact point for the signatories. Please feel free to communicate with her any questions or reactions you have in regard to this proposal (Department of History, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4302, e-mail: monica.green@asu.edu, tel: 480-965-4762).