Sex and Suffering

Janet McCalman

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780522849028
• eBook ISBN:
  9780522862966
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Sex and Suffering is a ground-breaking work. It tells 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.
It offers a graphic and revealing history of childbirth in Australia; of the medical care of women; of nursing and gender roles; and of the impact of immigration on Australian society.
Remarkably, thousands of detailed case notes, from the 1850s to the 1930s, survived intact at the Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne. For the first time in the English-speaking world a historian was allowed to work directly from these confidential patient records.
Janet McCalman vividly recreates the lives of patients and the daily work of a hospital. She enables readers to follow the institution through times of growth and economic depression, through the grim history of criminal abortion, and through the inspiring story of medical science and surgery since the coming of anaesthesia.
Sex and Suffering is a vivid and absorbing social history of women's health, seen through the work of Australia's oldest women's hospital.

Index

References to illustrations are in italics

abdominal pregnancy, case of, 73–7

Aborigines and Aboriginal health, 40, 278, 366

abortion: 40, 163–4; spontaneous, 11 induced, 40, 42, 124–34, 152, 154–5, 165, 168, 189, 205–7, 212–21, 231, 232, 247, 276, 306–9, 322–3, 327–8, 337–9, 342, 358

acetonuria, 162

Acton, Dr William, 35

Adam, Dr George Rothwell, 118, 123–4, 132, 133, 134, 158

Addison, Dr, 34

Adey, Dr Charles, 224

adhesion, 44

admission of patients, 10–11, 314, 326, 362

adoption, 156, 271–8 passim, 322, 325, 342, 361

After-Care Hospital, 204, 205

alcohol: abuse of and alcoholics, 32, 100, 104, 107, 158, 180, 203 therapeutic use of, 21, 75, 106

Alexander, Dr Lilian, 84, 84

Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, 53, 85, 103, 136

Allan, Professor R. Marshall, 160, 165–8, 168, 198, 204, 297

Allen, Professor Sir Harry Brookes, 56, 66, 133–4

almoners, see social work

amniocentesis, 247

anaesthesia, 12, 17, 21, 25–7, 28–9, 37–8, 43, 46, 47, 247–51, 286

analgesia, 21–2, 25–6, 74–5, 247–51, 275, 286

Anderson, Dr Eugene, 70–1, 94, 94, 98, 163

Anderson, Dr Margaret, 205

Andrade’s bookshop, 126

antenatal care, 156–65, 235–9, 245–6, 257

antibiotics, 207, 226–31

antisepsis, 54–72, 79, 85, 117

antiseptic midwifery, 61–72

Arbuckle, Sister, 174

Archer, Nurse, 76–8, 80

argyrol, 179

Arms, Suzanne, 332

ascites, 9, 36

asepsis, 55, 62, 117, 160

Atkins, Nurse, 78

Attwood, Professor H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• I Tracy’s Hospital 1856–1874
• II Sepsis and Antisepsis 1875–1902
• III Women and Doctors 1883–1913
• IV Class Relations 1914–1931
• V ‘Enormous Clinical Material’ 1932–1960
• VI Human Relations 1945–1970
• VII Transformations 1970–1996
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright