The Library
A geography of medical knowledge : country doctors in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Sarah Orne Jewett
Tools
Tools
Tools
Storey, Mark (2010) A geography of medical knowledge : country doctors in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Sarah Orne Jewett. Journal of American Studies, Vol.44 (No.4). pp. 691-708. doi:10.1017/S0021875810001283
Research output not available from this repository, contact author.
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875810001283
Abstract
This essay examines two of the best-known postbellum representations of country doctors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882) and Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884). While they have often been considered from a feminist point of view, this essay seeks both to complement and to argue against these existing readings by bringing a specifically geo-medical framework to bear on the texts. I consider both the thematic and the generic implications of representing country doctors in the postbellum era, exploring how they reflect, refract and encode the state of medical knowledge in postbellum America. I argue that literary representations of country doctors can contribute to an understanding of postbellum medical modernization by decentring it – by, in a sense, allowing us to comprehend the course of modern medical knowledge from a place usually assumed to remain outside modernity's transformations. Whilst I do, therefore, approach both these novels from a loosely new historicist perspective, I also want to think about how the social context they were engaging with determined, constrained and embedded itself into the thematic, formal and generic makeup of the novels themselves. Ultimately, this essay not only offers fresh readings of two important late nineteenth-century novels, but makes an intervention within the wider debates about nineteenth-century medical history and geography.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of American Studies | ||||
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | ||||
| ISSN: | 0021-8758 | ||||
| Official Date: | 2010 | ||||
| Dates: |
|
||||
| Volume: | Vol.44 | ||||
| Number: | No.4 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 691-708 | ||||
| DOI: | 10.1017/S0021875810001283 | ||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
