Sex and Suffering : Women's Health and a Women's Hospital

by McCalman, Janet

• ISBN13: 9780801862267
• ISBN10: 0801862264
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

Sex and motherhood bring women great joy, but they may also bring sickness and suffering. In this book Janet McCalman provides a vivid and absorbing social history of women's health, seen through the work of Australia's oldest women's hospital--the Royal Women's Hospital at Melbourne. Drawing on the hospital's patient records from the 1850s to the 1930s, McCalman vividly recreates the lives of patients and the daily work of the hospital. She follows doctors, nurses, and patients through times of economic expansion and depression, the grim history of criminal abortion, and advances in medical science and surgery, including anesthesia. Sex and Suffering is a groundbreaking work, telling the often shocking story of women's desperation to gain control over their lives and their health, and of medicine's struggle to comprehend and manage the mysteries of nature. This history of Australia's oldest specialist women's hospital is, therefore, also a history of women in the age of modern medicine. "One of the most profound insights into our social history we have had for a long time... Here is why the so-called sexual revolution of the '60s had to happen... why taking control of our bodies and therefore our lives became a central tenet of feminism -- so that our daughters didn't suffer as our mothers had... The book is also a monument to faith in human improvement, our capacity to care and survival." -- Hilary McPhee, The Sunday Age (Melbourne)

Author Biography

Janet McCalman is a senior lecturer in the Centre for the Study of Health at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Struggletown and Journeyings.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Abbreviations	x
Acknowledgements	xi
I Tracy's Hospital 1856--1874
Founding a Hospital	3	(12)
Lying-in	15	(20)
The Diseases Peculiar to Women	35	(18)
II Sepsis and Antisepsis 1875--1902
Fever House	53	(20)
`Servants in the Temple of Purity'	73	(20)
III Women and Doctors 1883--1913
The Sickness of Women	93	(24)
The Natural and the Unnatural	117	(30)
IV Class Relations 1914--1931
Improving the Race	147	(24)
`An Interesting Introduction to the Family Life of the Proletariat'	171	(26)
V `Enormous Clinical Material' 1932--1960
Poverty and Pain	197	(26)
Watersheds	223	(32)
VI Human Relations 1945--1970
Managing Difference	255	(24)
Nurses	279	(34)
VII Transformations 1970--1996
Values	313	(16)
Practices	329	(22)
Chances	351	(51)
Appendixes
I Confinements 1857--1887
Births, Maternal Deaths, Causes of Maternal Death, Perinatal Deaths, Complications, Interventions	369	(6)
II Obsterical and Post-abortal Sepsis Deaths 1939--1940	375	(6)
III Nursing Notes 1914--1916	381	(21)
Notes	402	(10)
Bibliography	412	(2)
Index	414