"Should Female Physicians Treat Male Patients?": Doctoring the Other Sex, "Love Sickness," and Representations of the American Woman Doctor, 1850–1900

Abstract:One urgent reason for the widespread opposition to the medical education and training of American women in the second half of the nineteenth century was the fact that women certified as doctors would be eligible to treat patients of the other sex, examining their bodies in a manner that provoked accusations of indelicacy or impropriety. Yet many of the period's numerous woman-doctor fictions depict the protagonist favorably ministering to male patients. There also appeared, however, a series of texts in which the medical woman's skills are comically traduced, as an ailing man is treated by a young, attractive female physician whose manipulations arouse the kind of "love sickness" that only she is equipped to "cure." Such disparaging images competed with richer, more nuanced representations of women doctoring male patients in shaping the cultural, social, and professional reception of the medical woman in the United States throughout the period.