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Palgrave Macmillan

Purity and Pollution

Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine

  • Book
  • © 1998

Overview

Authors:
  1. Alison Bashford

    1. University of Sydney, Australia

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Part of the book series: Studies in Gender History (SGH)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
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  2. Sanitising Spaces: The Body and the Domestic in Public Health

    • Alison Bashford
    Pages 1-19

  3. Female Bodies at Work: Narratives of the ‘Old’ Nurse and the ‘New’ Nurse

    • Alison Bashford
    Pages 21-39

  4. ‘Disciplines of the Flesh’: Sexuality, Religion and the Modern Nurse

    • Alison Bashford
    Pages 41-61

  5. Pathologising the Practitioner: Puerperal Fever in the 1860s

    • Alison Bashford
    Pages 63-83

  6. Feminising Medicine: The Gendered Politics of Health

    • Alison Bashford
    Pages 85-105

  7. Dissecting the Feminine: Women Doctors and Dead Bodies in the Late Nineteenth Century

    • Alison Bashford
    Pages 107-126

  8. Sterile Bodies: Germs and the Gendered Practitioner

    • Alison Bashford
    Pages 127-147

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 149-188
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Sydney, Australia

    Alison Bashford

About the author

Alison 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.

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