Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600–1700

Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600–1700 PDF Author: Lyn Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108654878
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
How did physicians come to dominate the medical profession? Lyn Bennett challenges the seemingly self-evident belief that scientific competence accounts for physicians' dominance. Instead, she argues that the whole enterprise of learned medicine was, in large measure, facilitated by an intensely classical education that included extensive training in rhetoric, and that this rhetorical training is ultimately responsible for the achievement of professional dominance. Bennett examines previously unexplored connections among writers and genres as well as competing livelihoods and classes. Engaging the histories of rhetoric, medicine, literature, and culture throughout, she goes on to focus specifically on the work of women who professed as well as practiced medicine. Pointing to some of the ways women's writing shapes realities of body, mind, and spirit as it negotiates social, cultural, and professional ideologies of gender, this book offers an important corrective to some long-held beliefs about women's role in early modern discourse.

Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600–1700

Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600–1700 PDF Author: Lyn Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108690424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
How did physicians come to dominate the medical profession? Lyn Bennett challenges the seemingly self-evident belief that scientific competence accounts for physicians' dominance. Instead, she argues that the whole enterprise of learned medicine was, in large measure, facilitated by an intensely classical education that included extensive training in rhetoric, and that this rhetorical training is ultimately responsible for the achievement of professional dominance. Bennett examines previously unexplored connections among writers and genres as well as competing livelihoods and classes. Engaging the histories of rhetoric, medicine, literature, and culture throughout, she goes on to focus specifically on the work of women who professed as well as practiced medicine. Pointing to some of the ways women's writing shapes realities of body, mind, and spirit as it negotiates social, cultural, and professional ideologies of gender, this book offers an important corrective to some long-held beliefs about women's role in early modern discourse.

Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600-1700

Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600-1700 PDF Author: Lyn Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108425194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
A subtle yet wide-ranging study confirming the importance of rhetoric in physicians' rise to medical dominance and prestige.

Reimagining Illness

Reimagining Illness PDF Author: Heather Meek
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 022801980X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses. In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers – Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney – alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of women’s bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility. Reimagining Illness offers a new account of the vital period in medico-literary history between 1660 and 1815, revealing how the works of women writers not only represented the medicine of their time but also contributed meaningfully to its developments.

Conversational Rhetoric

Conversational Rhetoric PDF Author: Jane Donawerth
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809386305
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Much of the scholarly exchange regarding the history of women in rhetoric has emphasized women’s rhetorical practices. In Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900, Jane Donawerth traces the historical development of rhetorical theory by women for women, studying the moments when women produced theory about the arts of communication in alternative genres—humanist treatises and dialogues, defenses of women’s preaching, conduct books, and elocution handbooks. She examines the relationship between communication and gender and between theory and pedagogy and argues that women constructed a theory of rhetoric based on conversation, not public speaking, as a model for all discourse. Donawerth traces the development of women’s rhetorical theory through the voices of English and American women (and one much-translated French woman) over three centuries. She demonstrates how they cultivated theories of rhetoric centered on conversation that faded once women began writing composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences in the latter part of the nineteenth century. She recovers and elucidates the importance of the theories in dialogues and defenses of women’s education by Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, and Madeleine de Scudéry; in conduct books by Hannah More, Lydia Sigourney, and Eliza Farrar; in defenses of women’s preaching by Ellen Stewart, Lucretia Mott, Catherine Booth, and Frances Willard; and in elocution handbooks by Anna Morgan, Hallie Quinn Brown, Genevieve Stebbins, and Emily Bishop. In each genre, Donawerth explores facets of women’s rhetorical theory, such as the recognition of the gendered nature of communication in conduct books, the incorporation of the language of women’s rights in the defenses of women’s preaching, and the adaptation of sentimental culture to the cultivation of women’s bodies as tools of communication in elocution books. Rather than a linear history, Conversational Rhetoric follows the starts, stops, and starting over in women’s rhetorical theory. It covers a broad range of women’s rhetorical theory in the Anglo-American world and places them in their social, rhetorical, and gendered historical contexts. This study adds women’s rhetorical theory to the rhetorical tradition, advances our understanding of women’s theories and their use of rhetoric, and offers a paradigm for analyzing the differences between men’s and women’s rhetoric from 1600 to 1900.

Available Means

Available Means PDF Author: Joy S. Ritchie
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822979756
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
“I say that even later someone will remember us.”—Sappho, Fragment 147, sixth century, BC Sappho’s prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the twenty-first century. But not without peril. Sappho’s writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women’s voices. Sappho’s hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion—across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations—in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them. Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do so in the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women’s rhetoric. Women whose voices are central to such scholarship are included here, such as Aspasia (a contemporary of Plato’s), Margery Kempe, Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells. Added are influential works on what it means to write as a woman—by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Alice Walker, and Hélène Cixous. Public “manifestos” on the rights of women by Hortensia, Mary Astell, Maria Stewart, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, and Audre Lorde also join the discourse. But Available Means searches for rhetorical tradition in less obvious places, too. Letters, journals, speeches, newspaper columns, diaries, meditations, and a fable (Rachel Carson’s introduction to Silent Spring) also find places in this room. Such unconventional documents challenge traditional notions of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery, and blur the boundaries between public and private discourse. Included, too, are writers whose voices have not been heard in any tradition. Ritchie and Ronald seek to “unsettle” as they expand the women’s rhetorical canon. Arranged chronologically, Available Means is designed as a classroom text that will allow students to hear women speaking to each other across centuries, and to see how women have added new places from which arguments can be made. Each selection is accompanied by an extensive headnote, which sets the reading in context. The breadth of material will allow students to ask such questions as “How might we define women’s rhetoric? How have women used and subverted traditional rhetoric?” A topical index at the end of the book provides teachers a guide through the rhetorical riches. Available Means will be an invaluable text for rhetoric courses of all levels, as well as for women’s studies courses.

Out of the Dead House

Out of the Dead House PDF Author: Susan Wells
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299171736
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. Out of the Dead House rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science. Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read. Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature

The Female Body in Medicine and Literature PDF Author: Andrew Mangham
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846314720
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Drawing on a range of texts from the seventeenth century to the present, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature explores accounts of motherhood, fertility, and clinical procedures for what they have to tell us about the development of women's medicine. The essays here offer nuanced historical analyses of subjects that have received little critical attention, including the relationship between gynecology and psychology and the influence of popular art forms on so-called women's science prior to the twenty-first century. Taken together, these essays offer a wealth of insight into the medical treatment of women and will appeal to scholars in gender studies, literature, and the history of medicine.

Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty

Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty PDF Author: P. Pender
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137008016
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
An in-depth study of early modern women's modesty rhetoric from the English Reformation to the Restoration. This book provides new readings of modesty's gendered deployment in the works of Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.

Listening to Their Voices

Listening to Their Voices PDF Author: Molly Meijer Wertheimer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781570031717
Category : Rhetoric
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. Though composed from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional women rhetoricians and their unusual rhetorical practices and strategies.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 PDF Author: Devoney Looser
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801887054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.