The Doctors BlackwellPreview
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3. Chapter two:Betweenity page 23

Saturday, November 01, 2025 04:11PM

CHAPTER TWO: BETWEENITY (TYPED 1/7/2025)

“left her family for the first time”

“school mistress in Henderson, KY

Define Transcenentlism

could she possibly find a soulmate among people who owned human

souls?”

in the midst of beings, degraded to the utmost in ody and mind,

drudging on from earliest morning to latest night, …blamed

unjustly and without spirit enough to reply…with no hope for the

future, smelling horridly an as ugly as Satan p to live in their

midst, utterly powerless to help them, is to me dreadful.”

intense longing to scream”

“When you have finished our studies, we may perhaps join together

in some undertaking, and make the cash come in like a perfect Croton

river, what fountains and baths we will establish in our domestic

city, how we will wash away all trouble and annoyance and make all

clean and fresh.”

“most haste worst speed”

“Everyone recognized Elizabeth’s caged force.”

“Some patients preferred an experienced lay practitioner to a man

with an M.D.”

general state of human health had rarely been worse”

explosive growth of cities had accelerated the evils that

proliferate whenever too many people occupy too little space:

contaminated water, accumulated garbage and manure, and the fleas

and rats and lice that were the ony beneficiaries of the

overcrowding. Babies died almost as often as they lived…Those

lucky enough to survive childhood later succumbed to tuberculosis,

cholera, typhoid fever, and influenza. No one had yet figured out

why these plagues took hold, or how to help the afflicted. In 1845,

medicine was a strange choice for anyone who craved professional

prestige, let alone a woman.”

dedication was to the life of the mind.”

meta physics

Margaret Fuller: Trnscendentalist Magazine: “The Dial” …

“Woman in the Nineteenth Century”

“Humanity would achieve a moral awakening…only when women

enjoyed the same independence as men..a step that women must claim

for themselves rather than waiting for men to grant it.”

think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range

of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers…If you

ask me what offices they may fill; I reply..any.”

Fuller: “I believe that, at present, women are the best helpers

of one another.”

brother Sam: “…trapped in tedious bookkeeping jobs that left

him no leisure for idealism.”

of proving Margaret Fuller’s faith in woman’s equal aptitude.”

of intimacy with another, at any stage of Elizabeth’s life, is

scarce in the letters and journals she left behind.”

Reactions to E’s goal of becoming a physician: 1) “a female

physician was an interesting idea; 2) “given the long years and

great expense of study, and the intellectual and physical endurance

required to practice, not to mention the basic truth that no female

would be welcome among male students in a medical lecture hall or

operating theater;” 3) “it was quite impossible;” 4) “…what

self-respecting woman would voluntarily expose herself to the naked

realities of the body in the company of men?;” 5) “the

unmentionable question of such a woman’s own body, incapacitated

monthly.” 6) “Bedrest was a common prescription for menstrual

complaints, and what would a lady doctor’s patients do then?”

forces ranged against Elizabeth”

course, women had always served as healers-whether revered as angels

or reviles.”

colonists, among whom doctors were scarce, had depended on wives and

mothers and sisters to provide fist aid and nursing, not to mention

assistance at childbirth. But as Eighteenth-century questionable

Enlightenment ideas introduced empirical science and new techniques

into the healing arts, like the use of forceps during

delivery-female practitioners were replaced by male professionals.”

“As the establishment of medical schools and societies created

new frameworks of legitimacy, women were pushed toward the margins.”}_

Writer’s response to above: “My, My, we women have come a long

way since the 1700s, NOT.

E…”another batch of country boobies and boobyesses”

“…but the moral courage exercised was of high order”

Research: “Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk, Episcopal Bishop of New

York (around 1875)

“a work in five volumes, of 500 pages each

“Scientific observation and experimentation had fostered a growing

skepticism regarding the authority of doctors. Several schools of

alternative practice had emerged in response to the excesses of

medical orthodoxy, dependent as it was on bloodletting and drugs

whose effects were often more debilitating than the original

complaint. The body was as mysterious in its workings as ever, but

what is the highest authority on its well-being was the individual

who inhabited it?”

thyself,” said the Transcendentalists.”

Samuel Thomson…”help that al disease arose in cold and was

dispelled by heat”

an emetic commonly known as pokeweed”

“ideas had been subsumed into the Eclectic school, a botanical

approach that aimed to reform the excesses of medical orthodoxy

while preserving its grounding in empirical scientific knowledge and

training combining the soundest ideas from a variety of

perspective.”

overtake the Eclectics in popularity was homeopathy, which viewed

disease in a more spiritual light and prescribed minute doses of

mostly botanical preparations according to the “law of similars”:

the correct medication for a given illness would be the one that

caused the symptoms of that illness in a healthy person.”

Mesmerism

Hypnosis

Hydropathy…the water cure (page 37)

Define aopathic

Dr. Jonathan Moses Allen, author of “The Practical Anatomist”

see “grave-robbers”