Title Profound science and elegant literature : imagining doctors in nineteenth-century America / Stephanie P. Browner

Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, ©2005

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Description 1 online resource (304 pages) : illustrations Contents Introduction: what's a doctor, after all? -- 1. Professional medicine, democracy, and the modern body: the discovery of etherization -- 2. Reading the body: Hawthorne's tales of medical ambition -- 3. Carnival bodies and medical professionalism in Melville's fiction -- 4. Class and character: doctors in nineteenth-century periodicals -- 5. Gender, medicine, and literature in postbellum fiction -- 6. Social surgery: physicians on the color line -- Epilogue: from the clinic to the research laboratory: a case study of three stories Summary In 1847, at the first meeting of the American Medical Association, the newly elected president reminded his brethren that the profession, "once venerated," no longer earned homage "spontaneously and universally." The medical marketplace was crowded and competitive; state laws regulating medical practice had been repealed; and professional practitioners were often branded by their lay competitors as aristocrats bent on establishing a health care monopoly. By 1900, the battles were over, and, as the president of AMA had hoped, doctors were now widely venerated as men of profound science, elegant literature, polite accomplishments, and virtue. In fact, by 1900 the doctor had replaced the minister as the most esteemed professional in the United States; disease loomed larger than damnation; and science promised to manage the discord, differences, and excesses that democracy seemed to license. In Profound Science and Elegant Literature, Stephanie Browner charts this trajectory-and demonstrates at the same time that medicine's claims to somatic expertise and managerial talent did not go uncontested. Even as elite physicians founded institutions that made professional medicine's authority visible and legitimate, many others worried about the violence that might attend medicine's drive to mastery and science's equation of rational disinterest with white, educated masculinity. Reading fiction by a wide range of authors beside and against medical texts, Browner looks to the ways in which writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Holmes, James, Chesnutt, and Jewett inventoried the collateral damage that might be done as science installed its peculiar understanding of the body. A work of impressive interdisciplinary reach, Profound Science and Elegant Literature documents both the extraordinary rise of professional medicine in the United States and the aesthetic imperative to make the body meaningful that led many American writers to resist the medicalized body Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-287) and index Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL English digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Print version record Subject American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism Physicians in literature. Literature and medicine -- United States -- History -- 19th century Literature and science -- United States -- History -- 19th century Medical fiction, American -- History and criticism Physicians -- United States. Medicine in literature. History, 19th Century Medicine in Literature Physicians -- history LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General. American literature Literature and medicine Literature and science Medical fiction, American Medicine in literature Physicians Physicians in literature Literatur Arzt Motiv Medizin Motiv SUBJECT United States Subject United States USA Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book LC no. 2004054972 ISBN 9780812201482 0812201485

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