Purity and Pollution Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine [Hardcover]

Like medical knowledge and practice itself, most medical histories are fascinated with the bodies of patients. Bashford examines practitioners of medicine, as well as patients, as embodied and sexed subjects. She brings together recent cultural and feminist theories on the body, nineteenth-century medical history and the history of gender and Victorian feminism. Purity and Pollution is a cultural history which investigates the ways in which many different practitioners - male and female doctors, nurses, midwives, accoucheurs - were implicated in a discourse and a material practice inescapably about the pure and the polluted.List of Abbreviations List of Figures Introduction Sanitising Spaces: The Body and the Domestic in Public Health Female Bodies at Work: Narratives of the 'Old' Nurse and the 'New' Nurse 'Disciplines of the Flesh': Sexuality, Religion and the Modern Nurse Pathologising the Practitioner: Puerperal Fever in the 1860s Feminising Medicine: The Gendered Politics of Health Dissecting the Feminine: Women Doctors and Dead Bodies in the Late Nineteenth Century Sterile Bodies: Germs and the Gendered Practitioner Notes Bibliography IndexAlison Bashford is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has taught Pacific and Australian history at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Harvard University, USA.