Teresa Ortiz Gómez; Montserrat Cabré i Pairet. Mujeres y saberes: prácticas y saberes. Presentación. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 17-24.

Summary

1.—Cherchez les femmes. 2.—The Renaissance and Beyond. 2.1.—«Trotula» and the Trotula. 2.2.—Hildegard. 3.—Shifting Paradigms.

Abstract

Despite centuries of debate about the medieval medical writers Trota and Hildegard, there still remain widely disparate views of them in both popular and scholarly discourses. Their alternate dismissal or romanticization is not due to a simple contest between antifeminist and feminist tendencies. Rather, issues of gender have intersected in varying ways with other agendas (intellectual, nationalist, etc.). Recent philological researches have helped not only to clarify why these earlier interpretations were created in the first place, but also to raise our understanding of these women and their work to a new, higher level.

Montserrat Cabré i Pairet.; Fernando Salmón Muñiz. Academic power versus feminine authority: The Paris Medical School against Jacoba Félicié (1322) (Article in Spanish) Dynamis, 1999, 19, 55-78.

Summary

1.-Introduction. 2.-Power and authority: and interpretative proposal. 3.-Medicine practiced by Jacoba Félicié. 4.-Jacoba Félicié and the relation of authority. 5.-Conclusions.

Abstract

This article analyzes the trial that the Faculty of Medicine at Paris pursued against Jacoba Félicié in 1322. Drawing on her patients' narratives, it attempts to interpret Jacoba's medical practice and the particular nature of the relationship that she established with her patients. In order to identify and describe this relationship, we use a basic distinction between power and authority.

Alison Klairmont-Lingo. Women Healers and the Medical Marketplace of 16th-Century Lyon. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 79-94. 

1.—Introduction. 2.—The Hôtel-Dieu and its Practitioners. 3.—Shared Work Identities. 4.—Conclusion.

Although women's legal and marital status make them almost invisible in archival documents, what traces remain suggest that women participated in Lyon's medical marketplace in various ways and under various guises. At Lyon's municipally-funded poor hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, widows and wives of surgeons, repentant prostitutes, birth attendants, and «women» cared for the destitute and sick of Lyon, in the capacity of midwives, physicians, surgeons, and barbers. Though the records almost always identify women practitioners simply as «women» or by their first and last name, many of them engaged in the identical tasks as male practitioners. Outside of the hospital, wives acted as barbers or surgeons alongside or in place of their husbands when widowed. In the final analysis, municipal authorities accepted the help of female healers on the basis of their traditional medical knowledge, joint work identity with their practitioner-husbands, and proven skill.

Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth. «Be unto me as a precious ointment»: Lady Grace Mildmay, Sixteenth-Century Female Practitioner. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 95-118.

1.—Introduction. 2.—Establishing Female Textual Communities. 3. —Autobiography and Transmission of Knowledge. 4.—An Education in Medicine. 5.—Medicinal Meditations. 6. —Meditative Medical Theory/Medical Practice. 7.—Female Matrix of Knowledge.

Lady Grace Mildmay's manuscripts represent an unusual presentation of three interrelated areas of family, devotion, and medicine. By examining her autobiography, her meditations, and her medical papers, I draw together literary analysis and discourses of female devotional and social practices with that of medical discourses to illustrate the ways in which women practitioners may have acquired and disseminated medical knowledge, and interacted with their patients, as well as how Lady Mildmay, and presumably other landed women practitioners, formed a textual community of women who administered medical treatment to lay people in late sixteenth-century England.

Gianna Pomata. Practicing between Earth and Heaven: Women Healers in Seventeenth-Century Bologna. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 119-144.

1.— Lay healing: women on the margins. 2.—Sacred healing: women at the center.

In the highly stratified medical system of seventeenth-century Bologna, women healers occupied a low-rank position. Officially women could practice medicine only as midwives or as holders of permits for the sale of patent medicines. Women were a relatively marginal group even within unauthorized medical practice. Of the criminal proceedings against unlicensed healers only 12% were directed against women. In contrast, women were prominent in religious healing — as shown by the record of healing miracles attributed to female saints, and the importance of female convents as centers of supernatural healing. The different status of women in each case might be related to the different role of the body in lay and religious medical practices. While contact with the «holy bodies» of the saints was absolutely central in religious healing, «healing of the body» was considered a mark of inferiority in lay medical practice.

Bridgette Sheridan. At Birth: The Modern State, Modern Medicine, and the Royal Midwife Louise Bourgeois in Seventeenth-Century France. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 145-166.

1.—Introduction. 2.—Louise Bourgeois' background. 3.—The meanings of childbirth in early seventeenth-century France. 4.­— The birth of the dauphin. 5.— The death of a princess. 6.—-Conclusion.

Abstract

In this article I explore the connections between state centralization, the professionalization of healing, and the end of the royal midwife Louise Bourgeois’ (1563-1636) illustrious career in seventeenth-century France. Specifically, I analyze seventeenth-century narratives of two events which frame Louise Bourgeois’ public career as a writer and royal midwife in order to demonstrate the way that the changing meanings of childbirth and the role of the midwife in the medical hierarchy were bound up in state formation and consolidation. The result for midwives was that, though they could still practice, they were ultimately considered marginal to the medical community.

Ana María Carrillo. Birth and death of a profession. Certified midwives in Mexico (Article in Spanish). Dynamis, 1999, 19, 167-190.

1.-Introduction. 2.-Nineteenth century. Birth and development of professional midwifery. 2.1.-Schools. 2.2.-Maternity centers. 3.-Limitations to midwives's autonomy, and their response. 4.-Twentieth century. Decline and end of a profession.

This study examines the rise and development of professional midwifery in Mexico. The authors sustain that this profession was created in the 19th century by the medical profession as a means to eliminate traditional midwives and obtain access to pregnant women, women about to give birth, and women in the puerperal period. The relationship between physicians and midwives was never without its contradictions; however, conflicts increased after the establishment of gynecology as a specialty in Mexico. In the 20th century, physicians imposed increasingly stringent limitations on the activities of certified midwives and instead promoted training for traditional midwives, until professional midwifery was abandoned.

Maxine Rhodes.  «You worked on your own, making your own decisions and coping on your own»: Midwifery knowledge, practice and independence in the workplace in Britain, 1936 to the early 1950’s. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 191-214.

Summary

1.—Introduction. 2.—The occupational structure. 3.—The nature and practice of midwifery knowledge. 4.—Conclusion.

Abstract

Midwifery knowledge is a complex entity —comprising of training and experiential elements— not fixed but mutable, both informed and altered by practice. This study uses oral history accounts to explore how midwives viewed themselves and how they interacted with midwifery knowledge in an attempt to gain a greater understanding of their power and independence in the workplace and, as a result, of their professional status. Midwifery knowledge cannot simply be defined as the technical skills taught in training; it was also shaped by the environment in which practice took place and the midwife’s relationships with women and with doctors.

Michelle Denbeste-Barnett. Publish or Perish: The Scientific Publications of Women Physicians in Late Imperial Russia. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 215-240.

Types of Publications by Women Physicians. Hygiene and Women’s Health: Elizabeth Drenteln and Mariia Volkova. Aleksandra Ekkert and School Hygiene. Evgeniia Serebrennikova: Pioneering Ophthalmologist. Mariia Pokrovskaia: Physician, Feminist and Public Health Crusader. Anna Shabanova: Pediatrician and Women’s Rights Activist. Impact of Women’s Publications on the Profession. Conclusions.

Women physicians in late 19th century Russia emerge just as the Russian professions begin attempting to achieve some degree of autonomy from bureaucratic interference. Women took advantage of this discourse to portray themselves as competent professionals dedicated to bettering the lives of Russian people. Quite often these attempts to justify their work in the profession also motivated them to publish their scientific findings so that they could be viewed as legitimate scholars and physicians. This article concentrates on six women physicians, Elizabeth Drenteln, Aleksandra Ekkert, Maria Pokrovskaia, Evgeniia Serebrennikova, Anna Shabanova, and Maria Volkova who provide illustrative case studies for what many other women physicians were doing. Women physicians published on a wide variety of topics, from women’s and children’s health to various types of cancers and infectious diseases. A few also used their medical training to advocate for women’s political and social rights.

Consuelo Flecha García. Women's education according to the first women to receive doctorates in medicine from Spanish universities, 1882 (Article in Spanish). Dynamis, 1999, 19, 241-278.

 Summary

Introduction. 1.-An inescapable duty. 2.-Relations with other women. 3.-Constructed weakness. 4.-A policy of goals and demands. 5.-Tasks assigned. 6.-The possibilities of education. 7.-A professional presence. 8.-A change of perspective. 9.-Documentary appendix: Education of Women. Physical, moral and intellectual education that should be given to women so that they can make the greatest contribution to the perfection of Humanity. Report read by Martina Castells Ballespí on the occasion of being awarded the degree of Doctor in Medicine, Madrid, October 1882.

 Abstract

This study looks at the topic of women's education as considered by the first two women to receive the degree of Doctor in Medicine from a Spanish university. Dolores Aleu and Martina Castells decided to present as a doctoral thesis the development of an issue of particular relevance during the final decades of the 19th century. The importance given to public education and the difficulties young women encountered in participating under the same conditions as young men led these two women—who both held a bachelor's degree— to raise the issue and defend personal and social reasons that justified their full participation in different levels of education.

Paulette Meyer. From «Uncertifiable» Medical Practice to the Berlin Clinic of Women Doctors: The Medical Career of Franziska Tiburtius (M.D. Zürich, 1876). Dynamis, 1999, 19, 279-304.

1.—Gendered Medical Professionalization. 2.—Middle-class Women after the Industrial Revolution. 3.—Colleagues in the German Medical Establishment. 4.—German Certification Struggles. 5.—The Züricher Garde Makes Its Mark upon German Medical Practices.

Abstract

Problems in gender expectations and relationships complicated increasing professionalization of medical arts at an important point of transformation toward the modern industrial European state.  Subordination of women's work in these processes altered possible outcomes for German society in general and for female medical careers in particular.  Franziska Tiburtius was one of twenty German women graduated from the coeducational medical school in Zürich, Switzerland, in the nineteenth century.  She was a founder of the Clinic of Women Doctors despite prohibitions against certifying women as physicians.  Imperial Germany was the last Western nation to admit women to full medical practice in 1899.

Lea Henriksson. Sisterhood’s Ordeals: Shared Interests and Divided Loyalties in Finnish Wartime Nursing. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 305-328.

1.—Introduction. 2.—Politics of Selection. 2.1.—The Hierarchical Order of Nursing. 2.2.—The Fight Against the «Amateur Scare». 3.—A Calling for Sisterhood in Civil Service. 4.—Gendered Processes of Professionalization.

The aim of this article is to highlight early Finnish nursing in a special wartime context. Occupational development of nursing is envisioned by addressing at a more general level women’s mutual relationships and the opportunities and obstacles of the process of occupational development. The article debates two main issues. Establishing occupational domains was a process of selecting suitable labour force and training women morally, as well. The hierarchical order of nursing is manifested especially in the questions of auxiliary labour and the so-called amateur scare. War was still a time of romanticism with visible military and religious models, but women also struggled for their right to have rights.

Connie Shemo. «Able to Do Things of Which They Have Never Dreamed»: Shi Meiyu's Vision of Nursing in Early Twentieth Century China. Dynamis, 1999, 19, 329-352.

1.—Introduction. 2.—Founding of Danforth Memorial Hospital Nurse Training School. 3.—Training and Pay. 4.—Nurse-Evangelists and Public Health Work. 5.—Shi Meiyu and the Rockefeller China Medical Commissions.

This essay explores the writings of Shi Meiyu, a Chinese woman medical missionary, concerning the nursing school she ran in Jiujiang, China from 1896 to 1920. During this period, in both the writings of Western missionaries and Chinese reformers, images of sick Chinese women were frequently used to condemn many aspects of Chinese society. My essay looks at the ways that Shi Meiyu, in her discussions of the health of Chinese women, shifted the focus to a vision of Chinese women as skilled healers. I also explore Shi’s search for the funding to adapt her nursing school to the increasing emphasis on «scientific» medicine.

1.—Fighting Infant Mortality: Eugenics, Pediatrics, and the Founding of the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Haus. 2.—Competing Discourses of Nursing at the turn of the century. 3.—Professionalizing Pediatric Nursing during WWI: Physicians, Nurses, the State, and the Gendered Division of Medical Labor. 4.—Antonie Zerwer and the Gendering of Infant Hygiene.

This article explores the connections between infant mortality, eugenic thinking, and the professional development of pediatricians and pediatric nurses in the early twentieth century. It argues that the goal of the physicians affiliated with Germany’s National Hospital to Combat Infant Mortality was to create and disseminate a centrally-controlled message about infant hygiene, and to transform infant care into a medically-managed event. The deeply gendered ways in which both the hygienic program, and the medical division of labor were constructed, had the ambiguous result of expanding training opportunities for pediatric nurses, while at the same time, severely limiting their professional autonomy.

1.-Thinking in God, caring for the poor. 2. -The rise of experts. 3.- The end of a time. Conclusion.

This article examines the story of the Assistance maternelle de Montréal, an organization founded in 1912 by a group of bourgeois catholic women to provide material assistance and free medical services to poor pregnant mothers of the city. I want to show that even if the timid intervention of the Quebec state allowed the AM to survive during almost 50 years, the rise of the experts in the health field —a phenomenon to