Purity and Pollution

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

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

   PDF

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.

• cultural history
• feminism
• gender
• health
• history
• medicine
• public health
• sexuality

• University of Sydney, Australia

  Alison Bashford

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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