This project will result in the first book to investigate the extraordinary proliferation of images of women doctors in novels, short stories, verse, dramatic writing, and visual material appearing in the United States during the period that coincided with the initial rise of officially accredited women in American medicine. The project's chief aim is to illuminate the woman doctor's cultural prominence in the United States between 1860 and 1920 by exploring this array of representations of medical women, whose advent posed a uniquely provocative challenge to the nation's reigning social, occupational, and sexual orthodoxies at the time. This remarkably fertile imaginative response to the woman doctor will be situated in the context of the debate already under way as of 1860 in both the professional and popular press regarding the admission of women to the medical profession in the United States. The study will consider early depictions of young women's medical aspirations, examples of the """"""""lady-doctor novel"""""""" throughout the period, images of the woman doctor's professionalism and expertise, renderings of urban, rural, and frontier women doctors, treatments of American medical missionary women overseas, and women doctors in the Great War. What this project will argue is that the woman doctor, through this wealth of mostly favorable representations, came to stand as a prototype of the """"""""New Woman"""""""" in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century America. Offering the first thorough and comprehensive treatment of its subject, this study will shed new light on such issues as the history and culture of professional medicine, changes in the understanding of women's health, women's evolving role in the delivery of healthcare in the United States, and the presence of women doctors in American popular culture. The study will rely on both a formal and a content-based analysis of imaginative portrayals of women doctors in narrative, poetry, and silent film, and on the analysis of visual images of women doctors in the graphic and commercial arts. Through a historically informed approach to this large repertoire of images, my study will address the question of how and why the cultural domain should have been so hospitable to such a figure, demonstrating that these images proved instrumental in socially and professionally legitimating the woman doctor in the face of strenuous opposition and resistance within the American medical establishment at the time.
