Article ID: CBB358388615

Gender and Pain in Nineteenth-Century Cancer Care (2020)

unapi

In the 1850s, an American surgeon Dr J. Weldon Fell appeared in London claiming to possess a new cure for cancer. Soon after his arrival in the metropolis in 1856, he applied to the Middlesex Hospital's cancer ward to trial his treatments on the patients held within. The surgical staff wrote up their assessment of his trial in their minutes before publishing it as a separate volume. This article will look at this account alongside another description of Fell's treatment, written by the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and focusing on his wife, Emily Bowes Gosse. It will ask what purpose these textured narratives of pain served and what they can reveal to us about the dynamics of Victorian femininity and masculinity in the context of incurable disease. I will consider the accounts provided by surgical staff of the Middlesex Hospital and Philip Henry Gosse and interrogate their use of female suffering in their constructions of scientific masculinity and professional identity. Finally, and in line with the themes of this edited collection, I will show how male surgeons positioned themselves as expert analysts of their female patients’ pain, as well as how gendered attitudes towards the suffering experienced by individual women are inextricable from broader ideas about social class.

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Authors & Contributors
Barry, Jonathan
David Clark
Heidt-Forsythe, Erin
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
Seitz, Emily A.
Elisa Sevilla
Concepts
Professions and professionalization
Medicine and gender
Physicians; doctors
Cancer; tumors
Medicine
Pain
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
20th century
17th century
21st century
Places
London (England)
Great Britain
England
United States
Canada
Ecuador
Institutions
University of London
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