Please read and accept the terms and conditions and check the box to generate a sharing link. Create a link to share a read only version of this article with your colleagues and friends. 1972. BSA members have access to this journal as part of their membership. 311 0 obj <> endobj We use cookies to give you the best online experience. Login failed. In 2018, following years of protests and petitions to city officials, a statue of John Marion Sims was removed from Central Park in New York City. In 1885, physician Thaddeus A. Reamy condemned the reckless nature of the surgery, arguing that a “sinless ovary…should not be needlessly sacrificed.” His concern with the sacrifice of a “sinless ovary,” rather than the unnecessary potential sacrifice of a woman’s life, was particularly disturbing as it highlights the demeaning and biopolitical ways women’s reproductive abilities were prioritized in arguments for and against the surgery. A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane. Hailed as the “father of modern gynecology” and a genius innovator for his technique to repair vesicovaginal fistulas, he infamously experimented on enslaved women without consent or anesthetic in the 1840s. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. CW: This piece contains discussions of surgical removal of reproductive organs, breaches of medical consent, and experimentation on enslaved women and women in asylums. She never saw him again after being brought to Ticehurst and died two years later in the asylum. By attracting the attention of a boy working in the garden of the house next door, Hannah escaped after throwing down money and then her shoe – which she hoped, Cinderella-like, would identify her. Yet surgeons, including Battey, would perform these surgeries on women who had none of these diagnoses. 1985. The condition ‘puerperal insanity’ was labelled and defined in 1820 and thereafter male obstetric practitioners and psychiatrists took great interest in mental disorders linked to pregnancy and childbirth. If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Women were described, in the words of playwright Henry Fielding, as especially sensitive and subject to extremes of feeling and expression. This product could help you, Accessing resources off campus can be a challenge. In the nineteenth century it was anticipated that large numbers of women were likely to fall prey to mental disorders resulting from the challenges of childbirth and maternity. In Showalter's study, the claim is presented as having dual grounding. 1964. Sims published an account of Battey’s operation in 1877: Of seven patients, one died, two became worse, and one operation was brought to a halt half-way through. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming of a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The Rules of Sociological Method. Gilman, S.L. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery and Rape Legislation in Comparative perspective (Routledge: Ashgate Publishing, 2008). Coronavirus (Covid-19): Latest updates and information. 1961. Resistance to the surgery was largely concerned with women’s inability to reproduce. Coronavirus (Covid-19): Latest updates and information. Oakley, A. Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis for women, which was described as exhibiting a wide array of symptoms, including anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, (paradoxically) sexually forward behaviour, and a "tendency to cause trouble for others". We will home in on some of those 'critical periods' as well as exploring ideas about the impact of women's lives and social condition on their mental wellbeing. By mid-century these conditions accounted for 10 per cent of female admissions in many asylums. Háskóli Íslands Hugvísindasvið Department of English Women and Madness in the 19 th Century The effects of oppression on women's mental health Ritgerð til BA prófs í … By continuing to browse Women have been depicted as particularly vulnerable to confinement in asylums. Peter Mackenzie sought to confine his wife after he attempted to make Hannah’s niece, with whom he was having an adulterous affair, mistress of the household. As guardian of the home and family, women were believed to be more emotional, dependent, and gentle by nature. Alexander Morison, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (London: G. Odell, 1838), Plate VIII. First, it is based on a cursory discussion of statistics on the confinement of lunatics in nineteenth-century asylums. In the 19th Century women were thought to be intrinsically mad by virtue of their femaleness, which made them vulnerable, and women outnumbered men in Victorian asylums almost two to one. Infamously performed on those unable to consent, the normal ovariotomy is the removal of non-diseased ovaries. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987). Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), ch. 320 0 obj <>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[<1A62162C3B90314188C6A942E3A713DE>]/Index[311 26]/Info 310 0 R/Length 64/Prev 386246/Root 312 0 R/Size 337/Type/XRef/W[1 2 1]>>stream Elizabeth Foyster, ‘At the Limits of Liberty: Married Women and Confinement in Eighteenth-Century England’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), pp.39-62. This claim appears to have become part of feminist orthodoxy, yet has little empirical support. Sims himself even pushed Battey to refer to the procedure as ‘Battey’s operation’ instead. Sex, Gender and Society. *Mark S. Micale (ed. Skultans, V. 1979. Also you should remember, that this work was alredy submitted once by a student who originally wrote it. * Jan Goldstein, ‘The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France’, Representations, 34 (1991), 134-65. e-journal. ‘A Considerable Degree Removed from Pauperism’? Contemporary physicians such as Edward Tilt, writing in England in 1851, went as far as to argue that menstruation should be actively prevented for as long as possible as it was so disruptive to female brains. This seminar engages critically with this literature and also raises the issue of female agency – did women form alliances with their doctors, did they use medical diagnoses and labels (such as hysteria) for their own purposes, and did they even shape the views of those treating them? The email address and/or password entered does not match our records, please check and try again. Members of _ can log in with their society credentials below. Men, Women and Madness in Nineteenth Century Britain, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038594028001016, Mad, not bad: crime, mental disorder and gender in nineteenth-century Ireland. MEN, WOMEN AND MADNESS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITAIN Joan Busfield Abstract This paper takes issue with Elaine Showalter's claim in The Female Malady , that in nineteenth-century Britain madness was first and foremost a female condition. e-book, ** Joan Busfield, Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder (London: Macmillan, 1996). Elizabeth Robertson, confined in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in 1851, was on admission noted to be hopelessly violent, immense trouble to the attendants and other patients, ‘pugnacious, destructive and mischievous, of ‘superhuman strength’, like a ‘wild beast’ but eight months later became tranquil, industrious, clean and tidy, sociable and contented, and, symbolically, was discharged on Christmas Eve back to her family, ‘remarkable for her kindness of disposition’. Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. The normal ovariotomy is just one of the novel and brutal treatments that sought to treat “women’s illnesses” and prevent their reproduction. Her friends were informed of her whereabouts and she was rescued from the asylum, with the help of John Sherratt, a lawyer and well-known campaigner against private madhouses. This paper takes issue with Elaine Showalter's claim in The Female Malady, that in nineteenth-century Britain madness was first and foremost a female condition. The original ovariotomy procedure, designed to remove diseased ovaries, ovarian cysts, and tumors, was first performed in 1809 by Ephraim McDowell in Kentucky, before anesthesia was widely used. Amongst such cases brought to Ticehurst Asylum, Eliza Gipps was admitted in 1860 at the age of 40 after a difficult confinement with her first child, suffering from terrible delusions. Within a few years of this publication, the procedure was performed by an increasing number of other surgeons as a treatment for general nervous symptoms, such as hysteria.

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