Jessica M Kirwan // This past summer, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum after the death of George Floyd, organizations across the United States and elsewhere closely examined their own histories of racism and racist membership. Coming to terms with its haunting past, Planned Parenthood decided to distance itself from its founder, Margaret…
Author: Jessica M. E. Kirwan
I am the Assistant Director of Research for UF Health Radiation Oncology. I am also a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Florida. My research focuses on popular medical literature and literature about medicine in the long nineteenth century.
Better to Protect than Regret
Better to Protect than Regret: What Syphilis Campaigns Can Teach Us About Combating the Coronavirus Jessica M. E. Kirwan // In 1917, an incurable bacterial disease had infected an estimated 10% of England’s cities.1 It spread through sexual intercourse, then slowly attacked multiple organs of the body until causing a painful death. Little was known…
Radium Woman: A Brief History of Dr. Helen Chambers and her Novel Cure for Cervix Cancer
Jessica Kirwan // January is almost gone and perhaps few people have given thought to the fact that it is cervical cancer awareness month. Health calendars are hard to follow, after all (don’t even look at the month of September, which asks you to attend to eight cancer types), but coincidentally this month I became…
Let Sleeping Surgeries Lie? The Usefulness in Revisiting Battey’s Operation
Jessica M. E. Kirwan // I have been pondering the necessity and implications of retrospectively redeeming a procedure that in its own day’s standards was considered highly problematic.
The Edinburgh Seven and the Power of the Popular Press
Jessica Kirwan // This past July, seven women known as the Edinburgh Seven were posthumously awarded bachelor degrees in medicine by the University of Edinburgh, 150 years after they had been allowed to enroll in the medical school but not actually earn degrees. Although the women had garnered some support at the university, and much…
Colonizing the Womb: How William Hunter’s Enlightenment-Era Gynecological Images Redefined Personhood
Jessica M.E. Kirwan // Pictures are received information. We need no formal education to ‘get the message.’ The message is instantaneous.-Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Lasting Impressions of the Fetus in Utero
Jessica M.E. Kirwan // It was my interest in the eccentric and macabre life of John Hunter, the Scottish father of surgery, which led me some years ago to his brother William’s 1774 book, An Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, or “fetus in the womb.” But it has been a deeper interest in the…
Recording Women’s Contributions to the History of Victorian Health and Wellness
Jessica Kirwan // I recently interviewed Dr. Lesa Scholl, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, which is soon to be published by Palgrave Macmillan for their Major Reference Works portfolio. Dr. Scholl is Head of Kathleen Lumley College at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Readers of Synapsis will be interested to know…
Queering Masculinity in the Era of the New Woman Doctor
Jessica M.E. Kirwan // In Sydney Grier’s Victorian novel about a New Woman doctor, Peace with Honour, Grier plays with gender identity in ways only subtly hinted at in popular Victorian fiction and media at the time. While most depictions of the New Woman were focused on her supposed lack of femininity, Grier’s novel also…
Materializing James Barry’s Archive
Jessica Kirwan // Stories about Victorian surgeon James Barry encourage a re-examination of our own limitations in understanding gender and sex. In fiction and non-fiction, Barry’s transgender body has prompted discussions about the ideologies thought necessary for societal acceptance of non-traditional bodies practicing medicine.