Withycombe, Shannon K. (Author)
University of Wisconsin at Madison
Physical Details: 244 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation explores how both women and doctors understood the process and results of miscarriage in America from 1830 to 1912. With an intense study of both women's personal papers and medical writings of the nineteenth century, I demonstrate how the construction of the meaning of miscarriage was never natural, easy, or inherent. Instead, nineteenth-century Americans responded to broader scientific and social considerations alongside more personal desires in how they understood and reacted to a loss of pregnancy. In the early nineteenth century, as the science of embryology began to gain professional and academic authority, American doctors embarked on new investigations of the human fetus, changing both the meaning and the importance of cases of miscarriage. In the wake of this new science that strove to standardize the human fetus, American doctor attempted to bring similar universal standards to the meaning of miscarriage. This study shows the limits of that influence, as women continued to make their own meaning of pregnancy loss dependent upon social and economic forces as well as their personal family situations. While women and doctors periodically worked together in endeavors to interpret miscarriage, primarily in terms of its causes, these two groups primarily fashioned meanings within separate factions. Doctors, in medical periodical journals, at society meetings, and within universities, strove to increase their influence over miscarriage cases, but also to use the results of pregnancy loss to ferret out answers to larger mysteries about conception and gestation. In turn, women, both alone and in networks of family, neighbors and friends, interpreted miscarriage in a variety of ways, bringing their own personal desires directly in contact with larger social constructions of American motherhood and womanhood. Through this investigation into miscarriage, this dissertation reveals the medical and social arbitration of personhood, the corporeal boundaries of motherhood, the limitations of the therapeutic revolution, and the everyday experiences of reproducing women in nineteenth-century America.
...MoreDescription “Explores how both women and doctors understood the process and results of miscarriage in America from 1830 to 1912.” (from the abstract) Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3436996.
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