[UPDATE] PAMLA 2014: Women and Medicine in Victorian England (Now Due May 15)
Women and Medicine in Victorian England
Despite the increasing demand for a scientific approach to medicine in the nineteenth century, Victorian medical advice was often circumscribed by cultural expectations for women. However, the century also saw an increasing role for women in the field of professional medicine, including the first British female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The period's medical texts and practices along with the culture's more popular understanding of these practices as revealed in the literature and popular culture of the period thus provide a fruitful area for interdisciplinary academic conversation. This proposed special session for the PAMLA 2014 Annual Conference invites papers on any aspect of Victorian medicine's relationship to women. Possible topics include:
•Literary and cultural representations of (female) disease
•The gendering of specific diseases
•Women in the medical profession
•Gender as a factor in medical understandings of disease
•Specific medical texts and their typical or atypical approaches to women/the female body
•Diagnosing the female (vs. the male) body
•The influence of cultural assumptions about women on scientific innovation/the scientific method
•Studies of individual doctors/medical texts and their relationship to female patients
•Possible differences in doctors' care, treatment, and/or approach to male and female patients
•Hospitals for women
•Any other aspect of Victorian medicine's relationship to women
Submission Deadline: MAY 15
Please submit your proposal via the PAMLA website (http://www.pamla.org/2014). The online submission system will open on or around March 15.
For questions about the session, please contact Mary Powell at mary.powell@cgu.edu.
The 2014 PAMLA conference will be held Friday, October 31st through Sunday, November 2nd at the Riverside Convention Center in Riverside, California. More information will be available at the PAMLA website, http://www.pamla.org/2014.