Downloaded from http://mh.bmj.com/ on May 31, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
The reading room
On fiction, art and medicine Sarah Moss Correspondence to Sarah Moss, Department of English, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; [email protected] Accepted 16 October 2014 Published Online First 31 October 2014
To cite: Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. 142
ABSTRACT This is a deliberately eclectic and eccentric meditation on some of the connections between writing fiction, academic research in the history of medicine and the practice of medicine. The essay discusses creativity in research and writing, suggesting comparisons with the instincts of experienced clinicians, and explains the author’s interest in women’s entry to the medical profession. There is the suggestion of parallels between artists’ models and surgical patients in late 19th century British culture.
I sometimes explain to colleagues that I used to be a ‘proper academic’, by which I mean that I have a DPhil in a traditional kind of English Literature (Romantic poetry and mostly Wordsworth—can’t get more traditional than that) and for 13 years I made my living by teaching 18th and 19th century English Literature in universities, although for the last five of those years my academic writing was tailing off as I devoted more and more of my research time to writing novels. I made the transition gradually, and it helped that my first novel, set on an archaeological dig in West Greenland, drew on my doctoral research on Romanticism and polar travel writing, and my second featured an academic whose work was quite similar to that contained in my research monograph. I enjoyed thanking the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their inadvertent support in the acknowledgements of Cold Earth. But there are differences between researching a monograph and a novel. In the last year before I forsook academic literary criticism entirely, a colleague came into my office and found me ensconced behind three teetering piles of books from the university library: surgical textbooks relating especially to ‘austere’ or ‘remote medicine’; histories and memoirs of Victorian slums and especially prostitution; and catalogues of Whistler, Turner and Pre-Raphaelite art exhibitions. My colleague’s incredulity that I considered this haphazard reading to be ‘research’ was in no way assuaged when I explained that I had no idea what I was doing but absolute confidence that my story would emerge from enough of this reading. I went on to write Bodies of Light, a novel about the childhood and coming of age of a fictional doctor in the 1870s and 1880s, her father a successful artist and her mother a zealous Christian welfare worker. I don’t know if this peculiar blend of instinct and scholarship would work for another writer or another kind of writing, though my early experiments with creativity in medical education suggest that we might dare to pay more attention to hunches, to what a GP friend calls ‘end of the bed decisions’. An experienced clinician somehow
knows from walking past a patient what needs to be done; an experienced writer and researcher somehow knows where the story is to be found. In both cases one suddenly knows what comes next, how the story goes. Taboo stuff on both sides. No evidence. Nothing on which to base a grant application. It just works, and I don’t know that it would work if we examined the process too closely. This thought itself is close enough for me, but I’m thinking here about different kinds of knowledge, the kinds we develop through practice and ‘just have’, which we don’t speak about because it would be unprofessional, even though our professions—medicine, academia—may depend upon them, and the kinds of knowledge we are trained to present. In some ways, then, researching a novel is the opposite process of academic research because I’m looking for what isn’t and can’t be known. I can read all the scholarly work, and especially all the primary historical sources I can access, with the lavish resources provided by my institution and my academic status, but I’m looking not for new knowledge but for gaps and silences, the moments where the historical record goes quiet. Finding these gaps and silences, the dark places in history, is necessarily an exhaustive process, necessarily a matter of both scholarly and creative instinct. They are, for me, where fiction begins, at the end of the kind of knowledge valued by universities and research councils. I’ve previously written fiction about some deep silences: the fate of several thousand mediaeval Norse people living in Greenland in the early 15th century and inexplicably gone by the late 15th century; the experience of two generations of islanders on St Kilda in the 19th century who endured a neonatal mortality rate over 90% but still declined the services of the nurse sent to live with them for three years. I didn’t notice until a medical friend pointed out that all my books have a medical strand—my protagonists are prone to wobbly mental health, the first novel centres around an epidemic and the second around the questionable status of the health professional determined to help people whether they want help or not. The third is about a doctor. I don’t think this drift betrays any particular medical interests on my part so much as the extent to which medicine and narrative tend to coalesce, and the way medicine stands at our elbows at the times of fear that define human beings. Dying and being born, thinking about dying and being born. Send for the doctor, the nurse, the midwife. The question may not be why there are so many medics in fiction as why there aren’t more. The silences in which Bodies of Light is rooted are smaller, more individual than in my first two
Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010615
Downloaded from http://mh.bmj.com/ on May 31, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
The reading room novels: the silence of the artist’s model, the silence of the surgical patient, the silence of those (mostly women) whose images come down the decades in oil paint and medical textbooks but whose voices were never heard and perhaps never lifted. Perhaps they had nothing to say. I don’t mind because I’m not on a mission to recover anything that actually happened or anyone who actually lived but to find the shape of a new story, one that might cause a slight shift in how we see ourselves. ‘Historical fiction’ is always more about the time of writing than the time of setting. I’m interested in thinking about how we—I and my readers—got to where we are now, how our understanding of our own world is shaped by what we don’t know about the past. The stories and arguments around women’s entry to the medical profession are fruitful ground for me because they are complicated and precisely modulated. Women became doctors around 50 years before they became lawyers, academics and civil servants partly because there were both conservative and radical arguments for the existence of female physicians. The conservative argument is made from the point of view of the female patients and received overwhelming support from the readers of women’s magazines: modest women faced an intolerable choice between displaying their bodies to the gaze and touch of male doctors or enduring and sometimes dying of disease and trauma that they knew to be treatable. As in most parts of the world and most eras, many women felt that their identity and integrity rested on physical modesty, that they would cease to be themselves and to be valued by family and friends if a man saw or touched their unclothed bodies, although once disease had progressed far enough for it to seem likely that continuing modesty would lead to death or permanent disability, some women reluctantly sought help, finding the process of diagnosis and treatment only slightly less traumatic than the alternative. Letters and women’s magazines of the period also contain many anecdotes about women who chose death over medical attention from men. (In fact, of course, at this date it was rarely a choice since very few diseases were curable, and many patients of both sexes recognised this and preferred to avoid medical attention for reasons other than ‘modesty’.) In any case, there was a great demand from ‘ordinary’ women and their husbands for women doctors who could treat women patients, especially in relation to childbirth and reproduction. The existence of women doctors, for most of this group, was a necessary evil to save virtuous Englishwomen from the trauma of consulting men and from the consequences of postponing that trauma. They did not wish to be, or to know, women doctors, and often shared the concern of their opponents that medical education would unsex and derange the women who wanted it. The radical argument is more obvious to us now, founded in familiar feminist claims to equality of ability and therefore of opportunity and supported by reference to women’s long history as caregivers and physicians before the professionalisation of medicine. It remains astonishing that the medical men who rejected this argument did so on the grounds of women’s intellectual weakness and physical frailty at the same time as organising physical and sometimes sexual assaults on female students. It remains astonishing that the majority of doctors fought for years to keep women out of medical education on the grounds that any women seeking knowledge of biology must be driven by dirty-mindedness and unnatural compulsions which would be fed by learning, while continuing to accept with perfect equanimity the ubiquity of female nurses who routinely witnessed exactly the procedures that would ‘unsex’ female Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010615
doctors. As the medical women of the day argued, their opponents’ problem was not with women’s familiarity with human bodies but with women’s pay and power as doctors. The politics of class, gender and professional status overlapped uncomfortably then as now. It’s part of the novelist’s job to see the world from behind other people’s eyes, to understand identities we don’t share, but I didn’t try very hard with Victorian misogynists. There were honourable exceptions, eminent men who gladly passed on their expertise to the first generation of women doctors, but they were rare. Women’s medical education in Britain remained segregated and controversial for several decades after Elizabeth Blackwell exploited a loophole in the rules to claim the title of ‘Doctor’.i Segregation was problematic partly because it was difficult for women to learn skills not already possessed by other women. The existence of women’s medical schools in the USA and the less formal availability to women of medical education in France, Switzerland and Ireland allowed the international transmission of knowledge between women, but it was hard to learn new procedures and especially surgery without the physical presence of an expert. The slow and painful beginning of women’s medical education in Britain depended on the small number of men willing to teach women. It’s probably no coincidence that these debates erupted at the same time as antisepsis, anaesthesia and changes in the hospital environment allowed the rise of abdominal surgery. Survival rates remained low until the end of the century (around 40– 60% depending on the procedure and the surgeon), but for the first time it was possible to remove tumours and inflamed organs and, crucially, to conduct caesarean sections, hysterectomies and ovariotomies. At least in the public perception, the majority of surgical patients were female and the majority of procedures involved opening and cutting female reproductive organs. In the era when the Contagious Diseases Act (1864) authorised police doctors in port towns to conduct forcible internal examinations using a speculum on any women found alone outdoors after dark, the concomitant rise in abdominal surgeries seemed like another way for men to force entry to the female body, and especially to open the female body to the male gaze. Many Victorian feminists equated surgery on women’s reproductive organs with the vivisection of animals often conducted by the same surgeons in the same hospitals; in both cases, the bodies of vulnerable ‘lesser’ beings were restrained and cut open to gratify the curiosity, the hungry gaze, of the scientist. Given the low survival rates, it was not hard—or particularly controversial—to argue that surgeries were conducted as much for the benefit of the surgeon as the patient. New and explicitly feminist forms of opposition to abdominal surgery fitted comfortably into popular and well-established suspicion about the activities and interests of scientists always assumed to be male. I read several novels by late 19th century feminists protesting against abdominal surgery and vivisection and denying a difference between the two forms of cutting.ii One of my former academic interests was in the literature of food and gender, and I was familiar with the argument that feminism ought to entail
i For a full story see Julia Boyd, The Excellent Doctor Blackwell (The History Press, London: 2005). ii See, for example, Graham Travers, Mona Maclean, Medical Student (London, 1898). ‘Graham Travers’ was the pen name of Dr Margaret Todd, one of the first female doctors in Britain, who also sustained a career as a novelist. See also Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (London, 1897).
143
Downloaded from http://mh.bmj.com/ on May 31, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
The reading room vegetarianism. I used to enjoy teaching Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat because it could be guaranteed to animate the most staid of seminar groups. But her arguments always made me want to sit in the window of the nearest French restaurant and slowly eat a very large and very rare steak, because if those are the options I’d much rather identify with men than with animals. So I wondered about the women who made that choice, the women who read all the essays and heard all the speeches that said women were being strapped to operating tables and spayed like dogs and decided to pick up the scalpel for themselves. There weren’t many but there were some, keen to make sure that women doctors were not restricted to obstetrics and paediatrics but allowed to practise medicine on the same terms as everyone else. Women surgeons—or, since the specialism took some time to develop, women who conducted surgery— worked with less of the sisterly support offered to their colleagues in other ‘gentler’ fields of medicine, because there was an ideological conflict between the conservative demand for women doctors and the conservative opposition to the practice of surgery. It was a lonely decision, to open the bodies of other women in the knowledge that around half would die as a direct result of the surgery. It was these women surgeons or, rather, the subject position of these women surgeons that excited me. Taught by a profession at best bitterly divided over their existence, living in a society that had little experience of valuing women for intellectual or professional reasons and then also regarded as traitorous by the sisterhood who had supported them thus far, how could they wield a scalpel? How could the female body be both surgeon and patient? The difficulty struck me as similar in many ways to the more familiar dilemma of the woman artist who usurps the position of the man gazing on the female body and representing what he sees. In both cases there are questions about who is allowed to gaze on whom and for what purpose, who wields the scalpel or the brush.
144
I would like to claim that I imagined and went looking for the parallels between artists and doctors, but the truth is that I found myself reading biographies and memoirs of artists’ families while thinking about early female doctors without knowing why. William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, took it for granted that their lovers, wives and daughters would model for them on demand. These women’s bodies and faces remain ubiquitous in art galleries and on posters, mugs, coasters and mouse mats the world over. They are dressed in costumes, arranged with props, representing simultaneously themselves and figures from legend, scripture and history. We see them only, and properly because after all these paintings are art and not biography, through the eyes and hands of the men who loved them and whose work kept a roof over their heads and food on their tables. Like the surgical patients, they are merely prototypes, an example of their kind. I don’t think that Victorian artists’ models were simply objectified victims of patriarchy, although it would be foolish to claim that that’s not part of the story. Nobody is pure victim and we deny people’s intelligence and subjectivity by defining them that way. So I was interested in the returned gaze, in the model looking at the artists, in the lost minds and thoughts of women now remembered only for their bodies. But I didn’t need a fictional female artist in the way that I needed Ally Moberley, my fictional female doctor. I’m her. I’m the artist now. And here’s an important thing to say: writers aren’t doctors. We don’t cure anything. We don’t write books because we want to help people. We write the way my fictional patriarchal Victorian painters painted, to make beauty, to show the world in a new light, to provoke and seduce and frighten and entertain. My book is about the symmetry between art and medicine and I’m firmly on the dark side of the axis. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010615
Downloaded from http://mh.bmj.com/ on May 31, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
On fiction, art and medicine Sarah Moss Med Humanities 2014 40: 142-144 originally published online October 31, 2014
doi: 10.1136/medhum-2014-010615 Updated information and services can be found at: http://mh.bmj.com/content/40/2/142
These include:
Email alerting service
Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the box at the top right corner of the online article.
Notes
To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
The reading room
On fiction, art and medicine Sarah Moss Correspondence to Sarah Moss, Department of English, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; [email protected] Accepted 16 October 2014 Published Online First 31 October 2014
To cite: Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. 142
ABSTRACT This is a deliberately eclectic and eccentric meditation on some of the connections between writing fiction, academic research in the history of medicine and the practice of medicine. The essay discusses creativity in research and writing, suggesting comparisons with the instincts of experienced clinicians, and explains the author’s interest in women’s entry to the medical profession. There is the suggestion of parallels between artists’ models and surgical patients in late 19th century British culture.
I sometimes explain to colleagues that I used to be a ‘proper academic’, by which I mean that I have a DPhil in a traditional kind of English Literature (Romantic poetry and mostly Wordsworth—can’t get more traditional than that) and for 13 years I made my living by teaching 18th and 19th century English Literature in universities, although for the last five of those years my academic writing was tailing off as I devoted more and more of my research time to writing novels. I made the transition gradually, and it helped that my first novel, set on an archaeological dig in West Greenland, drew on my doctoral research on Romanticism and polar travel writing, and my second featured an academic whose work was quite similar to that contained in my research monograph. I enjoyed thanking the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their inadvertent support in the acknowledgements of Cold Earth. But there are differences between researching a monograph and a novel. In the last year before I forsook academic literary criticism entirely, a colleague came into my office and found me ensconced behind three teetering piles of books from the university library: surgical textbooks relating especially to ‘austere’ or ‘remote medicine’; histories and memoirs of Victorian slums and especially prostitution; and catalogues of Whistler, Turner and Pre-Raphaelite art exhibitions. My colleague’s incredulity that I considered this haphazard reading to be ‘research’ was in no way assuaged when I explained that I had no idea what I was doing but absolute confidence that my story would emerge from enough of this reading. I went on to write Bodies of Light, a novel about the childhood and coming of age of a fictional doctor in the 1870s and 1880s, her father a successful artist and her mother a zealous Christian welfare worker. I don’t know if this peculiar blend of instinct and scholarship would work for another writer or another kind of writing, though my early experiments with creativity in medical education suggest that we might dare to pay more attention to hunches, to what a GP friend calls ‘end of the bed decisions’. An experienced clinician somehow
knows from walking past a patient what needs to be done; an experienced writer and researcher somehow knows where the story is to be found. In both cases one suddenly knows what comes next, how the story goes. Taboo stuff on both sides. No evidence. Nothing on which to base a grant application. It just works, and I don’t know that it would work if we examined the process too closely. This thought itself is close enough for me, but I’m thinking here about different kinds of knowledge, the kinds we develop through practice and ‘just have’, which we don’t speak about because it would be unprofessional, even though our professions—medicine, academia—may depend upon them, and the kinds of knowledge we are trained to present. In some ways, then, researching a novel is the opposite process of academic research because I’m looking for what isn’t and can’t be known. I can read all the scholarly work, and especially all the primary historical sources I can access, with the lavish resources provided by my institution and my academic status, but I’m looking not for new knowledge but for gaps and silences, the moments where the historical record goes quiet. Finding these gaps and silences, the dark places in history, is necessarily an exhaustive process, necessarily a matter of both scholarly and creative instinct. They are, for me, where fiction begins, at the end of the kind of knowledge valued by universities and research councils. I’ve previously written fiction about some deep silences: the fate of several thousand mediaeval Norse people living in Greenland in the early 15th century and inexplicably gone by the late 15th century; the experience of two generations of islanders on St Kilda in the 19th century who endured a neonatal mortality rate over 90% but still declined the services of the nurse sent to live with them for three years. I didn’t notice until a medical friend pointed out that all my books have a medical strand—my protagonists are prone to wobbly mental health, the first novel centres around an epidemic and the second around the questionable status of the health professional determined to help people whether they want help or not. The third is about a doctor. I don’t think this drift betrays any particular medical interests on my part so much as the extent to which medicine and narrative tend to coalesce, and the way medicine stands at our elbows at the times of fear that define human beings. Dying and being born, thinking about dying and being born. Send for the doctor, the nurse, the midwife. The question may not be why there are so many medics in fiction as why there aren’t more. The silences in which Bodies of Light is rooted are smaller, more individual than in my first two
Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010615
Downloaded from http://mh.bmj.com/ on May 31, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
The reading room novels: the silence of the artist’s model, the silence of the surgical patient, the silence of those (mostly women) whose images come down the decades in oil paint and medical textbooks but whose voices were never heard and perhaps never lifted. Perhaps they had nothing to say. I don’t mind because I’m not on a mission to recover anything that actually happened or anyone who actually lived but to find the shape of a new story, one that might cause a slight shift in how we see ourselves. ‘Historical fiction’ is always more about the time of writing than the time of setting. I’m interested in thinking about how we—I and my readers—got to where we are now, how our understanding of our own world is shaped by what we don’t know about the past. The stories and arguments around women’s entry to the medical profession are fruitful ground for me because they are complicated and precisely modulated. Women became doctors around 50 years before they became lawyers, academics and civil servants partly because there were both conservative and radical arguments for the existence of female physicians. The conservative argument is made from the point of view of the female patients and received overwhelming support from the readers of women’s magazines: modest women faced an intolerable choice between displaying their bodies to the gaze and touch of male doctors or enduring and sometimes dying of disease and trauma that they knew to be treatable. As in most parts of the world and most eras, many women felt that their identity and integrity rested on physical modesty, that they would cease to be themselves and to be valued by family and friends if a man saw or touched their unclothed bodies, although once disease had progressed far enough for it to seem likely that continuing modesty would lead to death or permanent disability, some women reluctantly sought help, finding the process of diagnosis and treatment only slightly less traumatic than the alternative. Letters and women’s magazines of the period also contain many anecdotes about women who chose death over medical attention from men. (In fact, of course, at this date it was rarely a choice since very few diseases were curable, and many patients of both sexes recognised this and preferred to avoid medical attention for reasons other than ‘modesty’.) In any case, there was a great demand from ‘ordinary’ women and their husbands for women doctors who could treat women patients, especially in relation to childbirth and reproduction. The existence of women doctors, for most of this group, was a necessary evil to save virtuous Englishwomen from the trauma of consulting men and from the consequences of postponing that trauma. They did not wish to be, or to know, women doctors, and often shared the concern of their opponents that medical education would unsex and derange the women who wanted it. The radical argument is more obvious to us now, founded in familiar feminist claims to equality of ability and therefore of opportunity and supported by reference to women’s long history as caregivers and physicians before the professionalisation of medicine. It remains astonishing that the medical men who rejected this argument did so on the grounds of women’s intellectual weakness and physical frailty at the same time as organising physical and sometimes sexual assaults on female students. It remains astonishing that the majority of doctors fought for years to keep women out of medical education on the grounds that any women seeking knowledge of biology must be driven by dirty-mindedness and unnatural compulsions which would be fed by learning, while continuing to accept with perfect equanimity the ubiquity of female nurses who routinely witnessed exactly the procedures that would ‘unsex’ female Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010615
doctors. As the medical women of the day argued, their opponents’ problem was not with women’s familiarity with human bodies but with women’s pay and power as doctors. The politics of class, gender and professional status overlapped uncomfortably then as now. It’s part of the novelist’s job to see the world from behind other people’s eyes, to understand identities we don’t share, but I didn’t try very hard with Victorian misogynists. There were honourable exceptions, eminent men who gladly passed on their expertise to the first generation of women doctors, but they were rare. Women’s medical education in Britain remained segregated and controversial for several decades after Elizabeth Blackwell exploited a loophole in the rules to claim the title of ‘Doctor’.i Segregation was problematic partly because it was difficult for women to learn skills not already possessed by other women. The existence of women’s medical schools in the USA and the less formal availability to women of medical education in France, Switzerland and Ireland allowed the international transmission of knowledge between women, but it was hard to learn new procedures and especially surgery without the physical presence of an expert. The slow and painful beginning of women’s medical education in Britain depended on the small number of men willing to teach women. It’s probably no coincidence that these debates erupted at the same time as antisepsis, anaesthesia and changes in the hospital environment allowed the rise of abdominal surgery. Survival rates remained low until the end of the century (around 40– 60% depending on the procedure and the surgeon), but for the first time it was possible to remove tumours and inflamed organs and, crucially, to conduct caesarean sections, hysterectomies and ovariotomies. At least in the public perception, the majority of surgical patients were female and the majority of procedures involved opening and cutting female reproductive organs. In the era when the Contagious Diseases Act (1864) authorised police doctors in port towns to conduct forcible internal examinations using a speculum on any women found alone outdoors after dark, the concomitant rise in abdominal surgeries seemed like another way for men to force entry to the female body, and especially to open the female body to the male gaze. Many Victorian feminists equated surgery on women’s reproductive organs with the vivisection of animals often conducted by the same surgeons in the same hospitals; in both cases, the bodies of vulnerable ‘lesser’ beings were restrained and cut open to gratify the curiosity, the hungry gaze, of the scientist. Given the low survival rates, it was not hard—or particularly controversial—to argue that surgeries were conducted as much for the benefit of the surgeon as the patient. New and explicitly feminist forms of opposition to abdominal surgery fitted comfortably into popular and well-established suspicion about the activities and interests of scientists always assumed to be male. I read several novels by late 19th century feminists protesting against abdominal surgery and vivisection and denying a difference between the two forms of cutting.ii One of my former academic interests was in the literature of food and gender, and I was familiar with the argument that feminism ought to entail
i For a full story see Julia Boyd, The Excellent Doctor Blackwell (The History Press, London: 2005). ii See, for example, Graham Travers, Mona Maclean, Medical Student (London, 1898). ‘Graham Travers’ was the pen name of Dr Margaret Todd, one of the first female doctors in Britain, who also sustained a career as a novelist. See also Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (London, 1897).
143
Downloaded from http://mh.bmj.com/ on May 31, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
The reading room vegetarianism. I used to enjoy teaching Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat because it could be guaranteed to animate the most staid of seminar groups. But her arguments always made me want to sit in the window of the nearest French restaurant and slowly eat a very large and very rare steak, because if those are the options I’d much rather identify with men than with animals. So I wondered about the women who made that choice, the women who read all the essays and heard all the speeches that said women were being strapped to operating tables and spayed like dogs and decided to pick up the scalpel for themselves. There weren’t many but there were some, keen to make sure that women doctors were not restricted to obstetrics and paediatrics but allowed to practise medicine on the same terms as everyone else. Women surgeons—or, since the specialism took some time to develop, women who conducted surgery— worked with less of the sisterly support offered to their colleagues in other ‘gentler’ fields of medicine, because there was an ideological conflict between the conservative demand for women doctors and the conservative opposition to the practice of surgery. It was a lonely decision, to open the bodies of other women in the knowledge that around half would die as a direct result of the surgery. It was these women surgeons or, rather, the subject position of these women surgeons that excited me. Taught by a profession at best bitterly divided over their existence, living in a society that had little experience of valuing women for intellectual or professional reasons and then also regarded as traitorous by the sisterhood who had supported them thus far, how could they wield a scalpel? How could the female body be both surgeon and patient? The difficulty struck me as similar in many ways to the more familiar dilemma of the woman artist who usurps the position of the man gazing on the female body and representing what he sees. In both cases there are questions about who is allowed to gaze on whom and for what purpose, who wields the scalpel or the brush.
144
I would like to claim that I imagined and went looking for the parallels between artists and doctors, but the truth is that I found myself reading biographies and memoirs of artists’ families while thinking about early female doctors without knowing why. William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, took it for granted that their lovers, wives and daughters would model for them on demand. These women’s bodies and faces remain ubiquitous in art galleries and on posters, mugs, coasters and mouse mats the world over. They are dressed in costumes, arranged with props, representing simultaneously themselves and figures from legend, scripture and history. We see them only, and properly because after all these paintings are art and not biography, through the eyes and hands of the men who loved them and whose work kept a roof over their heads and food on their tables. Like the surgical patients, they are merely prototypes, an example of their kind. I don’t think that Victorian artists’ models were simply objectified victims of patriarchy, although it would be foolish to claim that that’s not part of the story. Nobody is pure victim and we deny people’s intelligence and subjectivity by defining them that way. So I was interested in the returned gaze, in the model looking at the artists, in the lost minds and thoughts of women now remembered only for their bodies. But I didn’t need a fictional female artist in the way that I needed Ally Moberley, my fictional female doctor. I’m her. I’m the artist now. And here’s an important thing to say: writers aren’t doctors. We don’t cure anything. We don’t write books because we want to help people. We write the way my fictional patriarchal Victorian painters painted, to make beauty, to show the world in a new light, to provoke and seduce and frighten and entertain. My book is about the symmetry between art and medicine and I’m firmly on the dark side of the axis. Competing interests None. Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Moss S. Med Humanit 2014;40:142–144. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010615
Downloaded from http://mh.bmj.com/ on May 31, 2015 - Published by group.bmj.com
On fiction, art and medicine Sarah Moss Med Humanities 2014 40: 142-144 originally published online October 31, 2014
doi: 10.1136/medhum-2014-010615 Updated information and services can be found at: http://mh.bmj.com/content/40/2/142
These include:
Email alerting service
Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article. Sign up in the box at the top right corner of the online article.
Notes
To request permissions go to: http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions To order reprints go to: http://journals.bmj.com/cgi/reprintform To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://group.bmj.com/subscribe/
