Feminising Medicine: The Gendered Politics of Health

Abstract

At the 1867 annual meeting of the Female Medical Society the American doctor Mary Walker was invited to speak.¹ In the face of much controversy, Walker was touring England, lecturing as much on dress reform and bloomerism as on women’s medical practice. This tour came on top of shocking reports about Dr James Barry, the eminent British army surgeon and lifelong cross-dresser, who was discovered to be a woman on her death.² Such incidents in the 1860s added fuel to shrill pronouncements about the unsexing of women which medical education would entail, descriptions of them, for example, as curiosities which the public would wonder at, ‘just as it wonders at dancing dogs, fat boys, and bearded ladies’.³ In the feminist Victoria Magazine, editor Emily Faithfull worked hard to undo what she saw as the damage of Mary Walker’s lecture tour to the cause of women’s medical practice. The respectable figures of Elizabeth Garrett and Elizabeth Blackwell, as symbols of the new movement, were hurriedly re-inscribed with feminine meanings. Faithfull described Mary Walker as

such an unfortunate contrast to ladies like Miss Blackwell and Miss Garrett, whose scientific knowledge and medical skill are only equalled by their modesty and quietness of demeanour‖a woman may be a doctor, and yet retain the modesty, purity, and grace, which are her special characteristics.⁴