The path from scholarship on male doctors in Victorian literature to that of women doctors was a somewhat circuitous one, the road having been laid more as a result of a growing interest in the fin-de-siècle New Woman than in literary representations of medical professionals in fiction or symbolic representations of anxieties about disease.
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.
Identity, Metaphor, and Illness in Emily Shore’s Nineteenth-Century Journal
One of the many lives claimed by tuberculosis was that of Emily Shore, a Victorian woman who began keeping a journal as a girl. In 1891, Shore’s sisters published excerpts of the journal under the title, The Journal of Emily Shore.1 I have previously discussed how Shore’s journal informs our understanding of the kinds of…
Reimagining the Queer Life of Dr. James Barry
Jessica M. E. Kirwan Often called the first woman doctor, James Barry lived a mysterious life. Yet to suggest, as many have, that he should be remembered as a woman who cross-dressed to pursue a career in medicine mischaracterizes him and diminishes the complexity of his life.
A Brief History of Women Doctors in the British Empire
Jessica M. E. Kirwan Cosmopolitanism and tenacity were required attributes of the first British women doctors.
On Illness, Geography, and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in the Life and Death of Emily Shore
By Jessica M. E. Kirwan The Journal of Emily Shore chronicles nine years in the life of a remarkably prolific and erudite young naturalist who died of tuberculosis at 19 years old. Published in 1891 by Shore’s sisters more than 50 years after Emily’s death, it includes 350 pages excerpted from a set…
Emperor Frederick’s Larynx and the Professionalization of Medicine in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe
Jessica M. E. Kirwan In June of 1888, German Emperor and King of Prussia, Frederick III, died of a laryngeal tumor at the age of 56, only 99 days into his reign. His death is considered one of the greatest malpractice cases in history, and, while most discussions center around the illness itself, here I…
