Abstract
Crosby contends that the entry of women and minorities into the public sphere as political and discursive agents, including as members of the medical profession, was facilitated by a broader cultural change in metaphors: namely, in the figure of the poisonous woman. Historically, the specter of the poisonous woman has been used to exclude women and minorities from full citizenship, but democratizing reformers avoided reframing the dangerous figure until the second half of the nineteenth century, at which point American popular culture witnessed a feminist “medicalization” of the misogynist fantasy that transformed her into a heroic doctor. In this introduction, Crosby establishes the backstory to this frame shift—namely, the Democratic Party’s creation of the innocent “Democratic poisoner” and the Popular Health Movement’s empowerment of women as healers.
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Notes
- 1.
“Amusements: The Holt Burlesque Troupe,” New York Evening Post (February 24, 1869): 2.
- 2.
Ibid., 2.
- 3.
For a brief contemporary background on Holt, see T. Allston Brown, “Holt, Elise,” History of the American Stage (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, Publishers 1870,), 182.
- 4.
For an account of Weston’s development of the narrative and its successful decades playing in America, see Catherine Sturtevant, “The Most Popular American Adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Play, Lucrèce Borgia: A Study of the Dramatic Taste in America during the ‘Forties and ‘Fifties of the Nineteenth Century,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1924).
- 5.
“Amusements,” 2.
- 6.
Henry J. Byron, Lucretia Borgia, M. D.; or, La Grande Doctresse (Thomas Hailes Lacy, Theatrical Publisher, n. d.), 13.
- 7.
Coramae Richey Mann, When Women Kill (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), 1.
- 8.
David Gilmore identifies this core concept of misogyny as “the ageless paranoid delusion: mulier venenata, ‘poisonous woman,’ the lurking female always polluting the well.” He notes that “This image of woman as poison” is of unknowably ancient date and expansive geography and has persistently afflicted “men of every possible sexual orientation” with an “anxiety that transcends time, place, and sex.” David D. Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 120. See also Margaret Hallissy, Venomous Woman: Fear of the Female in Literature, Contributions in Women’s Studies No. 87 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).
- 9.
Kings, in particular, have singled out poisoners for particularly horrific condemnation and punishment. Father of international law, Hugo Grotius explains this overheated reaction to poison thus: “And it is probable that this rue proceeded from kings, whose life may be defended from other causes, better than the lives of other persons; but is less safe than that of others from poison, except it be defended by the scruples of conscience and the fear of infamy.” Quoted in N. M. Penzer, “Poison-Damsels” in Poison-Damsels and Other Essays in Folklore and Anthropology (London: Chas. J. Sawyer, LTD., 1952), 5. Sir William Blackstone and Reginald Scot both explain the reasoning behind poison’s special status by linking it to treason and the inability of the powerful “betters” of society to protect themselves from poisonous underlings. Scot claimed it was the most “abhominable” form of murder because “children maie hereby kill their parents, the servant the maister, the wife hir husband,” and, worst of all, such rebels might succeed because “no suspicion maie be gathered, nor anie resistance can be made; the strong cannot avoid the weake, the wise cannot prevent the foolish, the godlie cannot be preserved from the hands of the wicked.” William Blackstone seconded this anxiety that legitimate masculine power and surveillance might fall to poison power: “Of all species of deaths the most detestable is that of poison; because it can, of all others, be the least prevented either by manhood or forethought.” Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. John L. Wendell (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1854), 196. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 67.
- 10.
Some of the worst antisemitic violence was occasioned by false accusations of Jews poisoning wells . Robert Michael, Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 92–4. Yvonne Chireau observes a similar poison paranoia operating on slave plantations: “From the mid-1700s to the turn of the century, proceedings against poisoners constituted some of the most frequent actions taken against African Americans by local courts in South Carolina, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia…. Acts of poisoning by blacks were considered seditious and were usually treated with the utmost severity by authorities or with violent public reprisals.” Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 70. Pompa Banerjee explores “the intimate association between witches and poison” in early modern European culture and examines how accusations of poison thus contributed to the witch hysteria and its genocide of women. Pompa Banerjee, Burning Women: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 149–152. The most recent analyses of Victorian Britain’s poisoning scare depict it as a hysteria focused on working-class women and meant to restrain popular unrest. In spite of Victorian fears that poisoning might spread to the upper classes, it was “primarily a crime of the poor and underprivileged.” Katherine Watson, Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and their Victims (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), xiii. James C. Whorton observes that the “arsenic paranoia” in Victorian Britain really only escalated after “[p]oisoning had been made available to the masses,” which also helped stimulate a bourgeois campaign of re-Christianization/control. James C. Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33, 24. Judith Flanders, Peter Vronsky, and Judith Knelman all note the profound lack of evidence for the existence of poor women’s poisoning cabals, although that did not stop their executions and attempts at legislation that would make it illegal for women to purchase poison (unless escorted by an adult male). Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 183–247; Peter Vronsky, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters (New York: Berkley Books, 2007), 99; Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 66–8.
- 11.
D. W. Winnicott argued that “the tendency of groups of people to accept or even seek actual domination is derived from a fear of domination by fantasy woman. This fear leads them to seek, and even welcome, domination by a known human being, especially one who has taken on himself the burden of personifying and therefore limiting the magical qualities of the all-powerful woman of fantasy.” Quoted in William Beers, Women and Sacrifice: Male Narcissism and the Psychology of Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 100.
- 12.
Women’s bodies themselves are often coded as poison because figured as the amorphous, boundary-defying “abject.” See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), passim, 54–5.
- 13.
Annette Pharamond identifies a gendered “discourse of poison” derived from “the profusion of stories of female poisoners... [which] seem to establish that women have a particular propensity to poison” and which makes women more likely to be suspected and tried for poisoning than men. Annette Pharamond, “A Hermeneutic of Poison,” diss., University of Rochester, 1995, 1. As Margaret Hallissy points out, men poison too, but when they do, “it is not seen as an action expressing malign qualities peculiar to masculinity.” Hallissy, Venomous Woman, xii.
- 14.
Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 67.
- 15.
Modern statistical analyses all show men poisoning far more often than women. Jack Levin and James Alan Fox put the distribution at roughly 60/40. John Harris Trestrail’s analysis puts the distribution at 46% male and 39% female, with 16% unknown gender. Trestrail’s research indicates that, whereas the proportion of female killers that use poison is higher than the proportion of male killers that use poison, men commit so many more violent crimes than women overall that they still exceed women in poisoning. Jack Levin and James Alan Fox “Female Serial Killers” in Female Criminality: The State of the Art, ed. Concetta C. Culliver (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 254; John Harris Trestrail, Criminal Poisoning: Investigational Guide for Law Enforcement, Toxicologists, Forensic Scientists, and Attorneys (Totowa: Humana Press, 2000), 53. Before this work, false statistics were used to “prove” that women were poisonous. The most influential fakery comes from the eminent criminologist Otto Pollak, whose seminal treatise, The Criminality of Women (1950), claimed that “6.3 out of every 10” poisoners in the nineteenth-century USA were women, results which he contended provided a scientific basis for Reginald Scot’s assertion that women are natural poisoners. However, his assertion was based upon an invented statistic printed in a sensational tabloid-esque history (Thompson). The USA simply did not keep these kinds of criminal records until the 1930s, and the best records we do have (McDade) indicate that antebellum women committed far fewer poisoning crimes than their male peers (roughly 30% vs. 70%). See Otto Pollak, The Criminality of Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 16; C. J. S. Thompson, Poisons and Poisoners: With Historical Accounts of Some Famous Mysteries in Ancient and Modern Times (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993), 116; Thomas M. McDade, The Annals of Murder: a Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961).
- 16.
For historians who have tried to debunk this idea of women’s innate penchant for poison, see Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) and Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). For feminist criminologists, see, for example, Mann, When Women Kill, 1; Ngaire Naffine, Feminism and Criminology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); and Carol Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (London: Routledge, 1976).
- 17.
Garthine Walker argues that poisoning was “the mark of lethal and treacherous intimacy , the most extreme violation of domestic order.” Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 125.
- 18.
Hallissy, Venomous Woman, xiv
- 19.
The concept of spheres—public and private/domestic—has endured multiple and often incompatible definitions and theorizations. I am not using the terms in their Habermasian sense. I am not narrowly defining “the public sphere” as the late-eighteenth-century construction of rational-critical citizens discussing politics outside of state control, nor am I defining “the private sphere” as a place where people conduct intimate and/or financial transactions outside of state influence. Rather, I am drawing on women historians such as Nancy Cott and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, who see “spheres” through the nineteenth century as fundamentally gendered constructs: the public sphere was what the contemporary culture generally and prescriptively understood as men’s work and world, while the private encompassed women’s work and world. The latter was tied tightly to the “domestic” or home, while the “public sphere” covered all masculine (and white) apparatuses of formal and cultural power, including control of the government and economics. This gendered construction of spheres was fused with attempts to define the citizen or the public (versus subjects of a king), concepts which political scientists like Carole Pateman have also noted were fundamentally gendered. “The public” can thus be defined as the collection of citizens who are granted full legally and culturally sanctioned access to the public sphere, where they may seek out their own benefit. They are allowed to be citizens for themselves, rather than subjects who exist for the benefit of someone else. See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Carole Pateman, “The Fraternal Social Contract,” in The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 33–57.
- 20.
A number of compelling studies have, of course, complicated “separate spheres” ideology, primarily arguing that women could use their “difference” to support incursions into public discourse. While true, this difference still required the exhibition of purity or self-sacrifice and so impeded a feminist movement that needed to claim women’s right to full humanity and self-assertion on their own behalf. See especially the collection, Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930, ed. Monika Elbert (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000); No More Separate Spheres!, eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Duke University Press, 2002); and Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830–1860 (New York: Routledge, 1985).
- 21.
See, for example, Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (New York: Schocken Books, 1976); and James Mohr, Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
- 22.
George Robb, “Circe in Crinoline: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History 22 (1997): 179. For a contemporary source that reflects the paranoia about poor women’s poison infecting middle-class women and encouraging them to kill their husbands, see Charles Mackay, LL. D, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1932).
- 23.
“Historical Rehabilitation—Lucrezia Borgia,” The Methodist (Saturday, April 3, 1869): 110. For an example of a stinging review, see Review of Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara: a Biography illustrated by rare and unpublished Documents, by William Gilbert, The British Quarterly Review, 49, April, 1869.
- 24.
By identifying a metaphorical frame or text as “feminist,” I mean a rhetorical structure that works from the premise that women are people worthy of equal rights with men. Specifically, a feminist narrative invests women with agency and subjectivity and validates both—or at least does not invalidate them by labeling them pernicious (or poisonous). The medicinal reconfiguration of the female poisoner is thus “feminist” in that it refutes that “pernicious” label and begins to portray women as having the ability and right to exercise self-determination in the public sphere and to engage in and shape that public on par with men. Furthermore, it grants women the subjectivity that only emerges from this agency so that they become heroes of their own stories, rather than relegating them to being passive objects meant to prop up someone else’s narrative of self-making.
- 25.
Jones, Women Who Kill, 102. The medical historian James Mohr contends that, “Citizens feared death from poisoning and considered the incidence of murder by poison to be quite high in the United States through the first half of the nineteenth century.” However, the evidence he uses does not come from popular culture but from the statements of regular medical doctors who had a stake in amplifying those supposed fears. As Mohr’s book argues, many of these doctors were trying to re-establish a slipping cultural authority by selling themselves to the public as experts in medical jurisprudence and the detection of criminal poisoning. The public, however, did not generally cooperate. For one particularly infamous public shaming of such experts and embrace of an accused poisoner, see Sara L. Crosby, Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 77–111. Mohr, Doctors and the Law, 66. Overall, the supposition that Americans were hysterical about a wave of poisonous women seems to be coming from a combination of extrapolation from Victorian Britain, a projection of the interests of antebellum doctors, and misogynist and false historical revision by criminologists like Otto Pollak.
- 26.
For more on Jacksonian America’s sympathetic configurations of the female poisoner, see Crosby , Poisonous Muse. Not surprisingly this divergent American and British response to the poisonous woman is paralleled later by their distinctive approaches to her feminist counterpart, the woman doctor. Kristine Swenson observes “darker” representations of women doctors in late-nineteenth-century British than American literature and argues that “women doctors fostered more cultural anxiety in Britain than in the U. S.” Kristine Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 105–06.
- 27.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For a more specific application of frames to political rhetoric, see George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004) and The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to your Brain and its Politics (New York: Penguin, 2008). David Gilmore has also observed that “[t]he link between women and poisonous language goes far back in the west,” starting with Eve whose decision to speak with the serpent was seen as the primary cause of sin entering the world, and this verbal poison of women “is entwined with sensual seductiveness and its cohort, physical corruption.” Gilmore, Misogyny, 76
- 28.
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, ed. and trans. Barbara Johnson (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 127. Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Scolar Press, 1996), 99. Western culture is not alone in figuring poison and print (and women) together. Christine L. Marran observes that regarding “Doku of dokufu (poison woman)”: “One reading of the character means ‘poison,’ the other ‘to read’.” Christine L. Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xix. For a comprehensive analysis of the conservative attack on popular education and reading, see Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For more on British censorship of popular culture, see Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998) 262–64, 278, 286.
- 29.
Historians such as Richard Brown have examined Jacksonian America’s almost obsessive commitment to the dissemination of information as the central motive shaping the new nation, and most recently Daniel Walker Howe has argued for re-naming the significant transformation experienced by the country in the early nineteenth century to recognize this fact. Instead of characterizing the country’s primary activity as a “market revolution” or a “transportation revolution,” he asserts that Americans were most impressed by a “communications revolution” and that “[t]his revolution, with its attendant political and economic consequences, would be a driving force in the history of the era.” Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.
- 30.
Randall P. Bezanson, Taxes on Knowledge in America: Exactions on the Press from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 88–89, 103; Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 58–62; and Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 83–150.
- 31.
John Neal, “Late American Books,” American Writers: A Series of Papers Contributed to Blackwood’s Magazine (1824–1825), ed. Fred L. Pattee (Durham: Duke University Press, 1937), 201.
- 32.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 178–79, 287.
- 33.
The Democratic female allegory draws on and modifies Mary Ryan’s “female allegory.” Ryan points out that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as actual “female people” with “self-determination and individuality” were denied access to the public realm, “representation of womanhood” or “female allegory” played an increasingly dominant role in national narratives and public culture. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 67.
- 34.
Philostratus, In Honor of Apollonius of Tyana, translated by J. S. Phillimore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 24–26.
- 35.
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). I quibble a bit with Halttunen in that I do not see the painted woman/Philostratian lamia as the dominant antebellum narrative. It remained an embattled minority narrative until after the Civil War.
- 36.
Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 20. For more on this shift, see Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
- 37.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” in Mosses from an Old Manse, ed. William Charvat, et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 120.
- 38.
Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 120.
- 39.
W. A. Jones, “Female Novelists,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 14, no. 71 (1844): 484, 485.
- 40.
Stephanie Smith has also noted this phenomenon of what she calls “Tender Avengers.” Stephanie Smith, Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
- 41.
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 46, 50. Shelley Streeby also uses Clover’s formulation of “cross-gender identification” to explain the appeal of George Lippard’s “imperiled women” to the “oppressed men” who read him: They “imaginatively experience the threat of violation by recognizing themselves in the figure of the woman.” Streeby would like to see this as a feminist move, but I do not think we can quite discount Clover’s point that it is still all for the men. The same argument can be made to trouble David Reynolds’s characterization of the women in Barclay’s sensational pamphletas as “feminist criminals.” See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 363–364 and Shelley Streeby, “Opening Up the Story Paper: George Lippard and the Construction of Class,” boundary 2 24, no. 1 (1997): 202.
- 42.
The Female Land Pirate; or Awful, Mysterious, and Horrible Disclosures of Amanda Bannoris, Wife and Accomplice of Richard Bannoris, a Leader in that Terrible Band of Robbers and Murderers, Known Far and Wide as the Murrell Men (Cincinnati: E. E. Barclay, 1847). “Common men” directed a great deal of violence toward exclusive brothels because their exclusivity denied these men their full democratic “right” to these women’s bodies. Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 84–85. For how prostitution in the antebellum era offered poor women “autonomy” and “independence” from men’s control in “a society in which many men still saw coerced sex as their prerogative,” see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 190, 185.
- 43.
The phrase “medicalization of society” belongs to Christopher Lasch and generally refers to a twentieth-century phenomenon that conceptualizes public authority as medical and sees public issues as problems of public health. This medicalization seems to have begun much earlier, however, with the popular health movement. Quoted in Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 209.
- 44.
For an overview of this history, see especially Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 30–59.
- 45.
For more on Thomson and Gunn and the political ramifications of their new faith in medical “common sense,” see Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15–56.
- 46.
Samuel Thomson, New Guide to Health, or Botanic Family Physician (Boston: J. Q. Adams, 1835), 199–200.
- 47.
James Gunn, Gunn’s Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend (Pittsburgh: J. Edwards & J. J. Newman, 1839), 137.
- 48.
For more on the sects and their effect upon the regular medical establishment, see Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine; William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1972); and John Duffy, The Healers: The Rise of the Medical Establishment (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1976).
- 49.
For the sects’ greater openness to women and minorities, see Anne Taylor Kirschmann, A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004) and Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).
- 50.
Two of the most popular women’s health advice writers were Mary Gove Nichols and Catharine Beecher.
- 51.
Lydia Maria Child, The Frugal Housewife (London: T. T. and J. Tegg, 1832), 28–41.
- 52.
Daniel H. Whitney, The Family Physician; or Every Man His Own Doctor (Geneva, New York: N. and J. White—R. Robbins, 1835), iii.
- 53.
Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 40.
- 54.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, et al. History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 3 (Rochester, N. Y.: Susan B. Anthony, 1886), 510.
- 55.
See, for example, Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett, Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 130; Frederick Wegener, “‘What a Comfort a Woman Doctor Is!’ Medical Women in the Life and Writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, Jill Rudd and Val Gough, eds. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 45–73; for the impact of medicine on the writing of British women in the nineteenth century, Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction.
- 56.
This argument has too many variations and appears in too many texts to do them justice in a footnote, but some of the best representative scholarship includes Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). One remarkable study does begin to rethink the domestic paradigm and antebellum women’s writing in relation to medical issues: see Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
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Crosby, S.L. (2018). Introduction: Making the Medicinal Poisoner. In: Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96463-8_1
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