Article ID: CBB117484363

The Indian Doctress in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Race, Medicine, and Labor (2021)

unapi

This article addresses the robust market in “Indian medicine” that flourished in the nineteenth century—partly due to the influence of urbanization, industrialization, and new technologies of print—and the specific roles that Indian doctresses played in that phenomenon. Indian doctresses in the United States operated at the intersection of cultural values and beliefs regarding womanhood, medicine, and American Indians. Not all of these women were of Native ancestry, but they all mobilized widespread ideas about Native peoples while seeking entrepreneurial success as healers. Using print culture, the author analyzes strategies employed by women who worked as Indian doctresses and patterns of reactions to their efforts. By combining profiles of women who worked as Indian doctresses with popular but not always positive representations of the type, the article offers a kind of composite biography of an occupation. Women from a wide variety of backgrounds fused caregiving skills with popular assumptions—particularly those involving “indigenous anti-modernity”—to make a living. In this way, Indian doctresses also became useful symbolic figures upon whom changing conceptions of race, gender, and class could be projected and debated. The author thus aims to shed new light not only on histories of American medicine but also on the labors of American women and the business of Indian representation during the nineteenth century.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB117484363/

Similar Citations

Thesis Peterson, Maya Karin; (2011)
Technologies of Rule: Empire, Water, and the Modernization of Central Asia, 1867--1941 (/isis/citation/CBB001567280/)

Book Tamara Venit Shelton; (2019)
Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace (/isis/citation/CBB229326361/)

Article Kopperman, Paul E.; (2012)
The Attitude of Benjamin Rush (1746--1813) towards Native American Medicine (/isis/citation/CBB001200776/)

Book Johnson, Lenworth N.; Daniels, O. C. Bobby; (2002)
Breaking the Color Line in Medicine: African Americans in Ophthalmology (/isis/citation/CBB000301576/)

Book Ward, Thomas J., Jr.; (2003)
Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South (/isis/citation/CBB000630043/)

Article Dudley, Anú King; (2010)
Moxa in Nineteenth-Century Medical Practice (/isis/citation/CBB001034281/)

Article Catherine Mas; (2022)
How Not to Be an Expert (/isis/citation/CBB772533919/)

Book Gregory Rosenthal; (2018)
Beyond Hawai'i: Native Labor in the Pacific World (/isis/citation/CBB027909201/)

Article Jacqueline Antonovich; (2021)
White Coats, White Hoods: The Medical Politics of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s America (/isis/citation/CBB549673660/)

Authors & Contributors
Kuster, Megan
Hill-Saya, Blake
deShazo, Richard D.
Jacqueline D. Antonovich
Mas, Catherine
Bernstein, David
Concepts
Medicine and race
Physicians; doctors
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Labor and laborers
African Americans
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
18th century
20th century, late
Meiji period (Japan, 1868-1910)
Places
United States
Australia
Miami (Florida)
Papua New Guinea
Southern states (U.S.)
Great Lakes (North America)
Institutions
University of Miami
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment