Authorized to Heal: Gender, Class, and the Transformation of Medicine in Appalachia, 1880-1930. (Book Reviews).Authorized to Heal: Gender, Class, and the Transformation of Medicine in Appalachia, 1880-1930. By Sandra Lee Sandra Lee might refer to:
abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-8078-4834-4; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2522-0.) Sandra Lee Barney covers a remarkable amount of ground in her important new work. Incorporating historiographic traditions associated with the history of medicine and public health, Progressive-era studies of reform, gender, and maternalism, and Appalachian history, Barney illuminates a series of class, gender, and professionally based tensions that accompanied the triumph of scientific medicine and emergent hegemony of physicians in Central Appalachia. These tensions characterized relationships between working-class women and their middle-class neighbors, rivalries between physicians and lay midwives/healers, contact between female practitioners and reform-minded club women, and competition between nurses and reformers who established public health services health services Managed care The benefits covered under a health contract and physicians who dominated local medical societies. Clearly, Barney's Appalachia is more complex than the stereotypical hollows inhabited by singularly ignorant and provincial mountaineers. Focusing on the decades between 1880 and 1930, in her early chapters Barney establishes the economic and cultural contexts in which central Appalachian counties first attracted formally trained physicians and chronicles the process through which physicians constructed a professional identity. The heart of the book provides an analysis of the region's women's clubs women's clubs, groups that offer social, recreational, and cultural activities for adult females. Particularly strong in the United States, they became an important part of American town and village life in the latter part of the 19th cent. and settlement schools and demonstrates that club women's effective educational and preventive programs convinced working- and middle-class residents--especially childbearing women--that they should seek the care of a medical doctor whenever possible. An especially compelling fifth chapter examines physicians' rejection of public health campaigns sponsored by governments or philanthropic organizations and argues that women's advocacy of maternalist public health programs waned significantly by the end of the 1920s. Again, Barney's analysis acknowledges the complexity of a society often presented as monolithic. For example, reform-minded Appalachian women did not simply lose their fight with physicians seeking to control or dismantle state and privately funded public health services. Despite intense pressure from doctors who considered themselves the single legitimate voice on the subject of health, middle-class women were also influenced by "the popular culture of the day" (p. 145), such as the ideal of companionate marriage companionate marriage n. A marriage in which the partners agree not to have children and may divorce by mutual consent, with neither partner responsible for the financial welfare of the other. (which steered many doctors' wives into dependent medical auxiliaries), as well as growing political conservatism. The sophisticated analysis, clear and direct prose style, organization, and brevity Brevity Adonis’ garden of short life. [Br. Lit.: I Henry IV] bubbles symbolic of transitoriness of life. [Art: Hall, 54] cherry fair cherry orchards where fruit was briefly sold; symbolic of transience. (160 pages of text) make the paperbound pa·per·bound adj. Bound in paper; paperback. version of Authorized to Heal ideal for upper-level undergraduate courses in southern history, women's history ''This article is about the history of women. For information on the field of historical study, see Gender history. Women's history is the history of female human beings. Rights and equality Women's rights refers to the social and human rights of women. , and the history of medicine and public health. A conclusion that outlines trends in Appalachian health care since the Great Depression and ties contemporary patterns directly to transformations and tensions examined earlier will add to the book's appeal for undergraduates. Graduate students and seasoned historians will appreciate Barney's inclusion throughout the text of links between her analysis of primary sources in Appalachian repositories and the work of scholars including Theda Skocpol Theda Skocpol (born May 4 1947) is an American sociologist and political scientist at Harvard University, presently serving as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. , Judith Walzer Leavitt Judith Walzer Leavitt (borm 22 July 1940) is an American college professor. She is the Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of History of Medicine, History of Science, and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. , Kathryn Kish Sklar, Sheila Rothman, Robyn Muncy, Barbara Melosh, and Charlotte Borst. The book's brevity did occasionally leave this reader wanting more, however. Barney provides multiple examples of public health nurses' frustration with physicians who viewed them as competitors and proponents of state/ socialized medicine socialized medicine, publicly administered system of national health care. The term is used to describe programs that range from government operation of medical facilities to national health-insurance plans. . In contrast, she asserts that settlement workers and club women who argued that maternalist voices should be heard over those of private interests "did not publicly acknowledge their awareness of the inconsistency of their allegiance to physicians who were themselves a `private interest' seeking to manipulate public events to their advantage through health campaigns" (p. 126). Did these activist women acknowledge inconsistencies or express frustration similar to that articulated by public health nurses in their private correspondence? In this instance and a few others, I wondered whether the argument was limited by available sources or by the economics of publication. Despite this, Authorized to Heal is one of the finest monographs in the past decade to combine women's and southern history. PATRICIA EVRIDGE HILL San Jose State University |
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