| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Susan Wells. Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 312. Cloth $57.95, paper $22.95.

Susan Wells uses the methods of literary criticism to decode historical documents, providing a rich analysis of writings by women physicians throughout the nineteenth century. That was the "golden age" of women in medicine, before the reforms advocated by the Flexner Report restricted the field almost exclusively to men. Wells notes the temptation to argue that women developed an alternative form of medical practice. Wisely, she makes a more limited claim: that female physicians made many of the same therapeutic choices as men but that their experiences and the responses they met were very different. Drawing on Judith Butler's notion of gender as performance, Wells demonstrates how women physicians constructed their identities within the various rhetorical strategies available to them. 1

The first substantive chapter examines the extent to which men and women conducted medical interviews differently. Women physicians took special pride in their ability to listen empathetically to their female patients and elicit their "heart histories." The intimacy that developed enabled female physicians to intervene actively in the lives of their patients, offering them advice on morality, financial matters, and religion as well as on the care of their bodies. . . .

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