SOURCE: Newberry, Frederick. “Male Doctors and Female Illness in American Women's Fiction, 1850-1900.” In Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930, edited by Monika M. Elbert, pp. 143-57. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Newberry demonstrates how the feminization of medical care in the nineteenth century—with love, kind attention, and deference to female-specific needs—either supplants altogether the role of a male doctor or enhances that doctor's abilities, as illustrated by both Gerty and Emily in Cummins's sickness-ridden The Lamplighter.

It might be supposed that Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall Paper” (1892), featuring a host of cultural conflicts involving a woman's mind and body as perceived by male doctors, would have a discernible lineage in American women's fiction of the nineteenth century. After all, the gradual and highly successful efforts of men to secure control over medical care in nineteenth-century America...