All's Well That Ends Well turns on a cure. Helena, orphaned daughter of the famous physician Gerard de Narbon, lives as a ward in the household of the Countess of Rossillon and loves the Countess's son Bertram, who is far above her in rank.
Medical tag
Women and Medicine
Women as patients, physicians and nurses; gendered diagnoses and treatments; medical authority over women's bodies and minds.
Works
Generation of Animals (Greek Peri zōiōn geneseōs, Latin De Generatione Animalium) is Aristotle's treatise on how animals come into being, and the most ambitious work of embryology before the seventeenth century. It completes the sequence that begins with the History of Animals (the collected facts) and Parts of Animals (the purposes of organs).
Herland is a utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in twelve monthly installments in her magazine The Forerunner in 1915. It did not appear as a book until 1979, when Pantheon published it with an introduction by the historian Ann J. Lane.
Notes on Nursing is a short practical book that Florence Nightingale published in 1859, three years after returning from the Crimean War. It was not written as a textbook for professional nurses.
The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever is an essay that Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a young Boston physician, read to the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1843 and printed in a short-lived medical journal. Puerperal fever, or childbed fever, was an infection of the womb after childbirth that killed many mothers in the first days after delivery, sometimes in clusters around a single doctor or midwife.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in The New England Magazine in January 1892 and issued as a small book in 1899. It takes the form of a secret journal kept by an unnamed young wife and mother whose husband, John, a physician, has diagnosed her with "temporary nervous depression" after the birth of their baby.
Passages
- All's Well That Ends Well, Act 1, Scene 3
Helena tells the Countess of her father's prescriptions 'of rare and prov’d effects', and the Countess doubts that the court will credit 'a poor unlearned virgin' when the schools have given up.
- All's Well That Ends Well, Act 2, Scene 1
The King refuses to 'prostitute our past-cure malady / To empirics'; Helena offers her life as forfeit if the cure fails, and the King accepts her as 'Sweet practiser'. A model scene for consent, risk and the credentials of a healer.
- Generation of Animals, Book I, Chs. 19–20 (726a–729a)
Menstrual fluid identified as the female analogue of semen, a less-concocted residue of blood; the female contributes matter and the male form.
- Generation of Animals, Book II, Ch. 7 (746b–747a)
Sterility in men and women from imperfection of the generative parts or from age and constitution, with the fertility tests he reports: semen tested in water, and women tested by pessaries and by colours smeared on the eyes.
- Generation of Animals, Book IV, Chs. 6–8 (774b–777a)
Premature 'seven-months children' who survive, the claim that sedentary women have more painful labour than those who work, the mola uteri, and milk as concocted blood.
- Herland, Chapter 6: Comparisons Are Odious
The tutors describe their society as organized around mothers and children.
- The Yellow Wallpaper, Middle entries
John threatens to send her to Weir Mitchell in the fall.
- The Yellow Wallpaper, Throughout
Her own judgment about her treatment is overruled by her husband and brother.
Quotes
“He that of greatest works is finisher Oft does them by the weakest minister”
“For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male”
“every woman is a nurse”