Week 8: Executive Summary

Susan Wells’ Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

            Wells begins this chapter by introducing the reader to Marie Zakcrzewska, a ten year old girl living in Berlin.  Zakcrzewska was the daughter of a midwife and followed her mother to school.  While at the midwifery school, Zakcrzewska was introduced to medicine and began her life-long career in the field.  Wells brings Zakcrzewska to our attention because she is the perfect example of how females entered the medical field in the nineteenth century.  Wells writes, “The protagonist comes to us as a little girl, curious, unafraid, strangely concentrated, usually accompanied by her mother and almost always be someone who acts as her father” (3).  Zakcrzewska is just one of many who began their careers in medicine during the nineteenth century, and while Wells points out that medical school then was not as rigorous as it is today, female medical school students faced far more obstacles than their male counterparts.  Because of this, female medical school students would convey themselves as females, but write as if they were males.  Wells points out how gender and writing and rhetoric all played such vital, import roles during this time.

            Because gender and writing and rhetoric are such important issues, even today, Wells looks at how the female medical students’ notes would change: some more feminine, some more masculine (she never stated reasons for the differences to her in what caused the separation).  Even the idea that female medical students were possibly looking into new forms of medicine through their female perspective, but were not given the abilities to do so, seems to greatly affect Wells.  “Seeing gender as a performance helps us to appreciate the rhetorical skill of these women physicians and their uses of the slender rhetorical resources available to them” (Wells, 6).  Female medical students were constantly having to prove their worth within the medical community, even though they were the ones pioneering less intervention, less harsh drugs and surgery, and overall, more empathetic to patients’ needs (8).  The gender different was definitely reflected in their notes and journals and Wells even suggests that they were practicing another type of science all together.