Reading the Nineteenth-Century Medical Journal

Sally Frampton, Jennifer Wallis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367643263
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000294101
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book explores medical and health periodicals of the nineteenth century: their contemporary significance, their readership, and how historians have approached them as objects of study.

From debates about women doctors in lesser-known titles such as the Medical Mirror, to the formation of professional medical communities within French and Portuguese periodicals, the contributors to this volume highlight the multi-faceted nature of these publications as well as their uses to the historian. Medical periodicals – far from being the preserve of doctors and nurses – were also read by the general public. Thus, the contributions collected here will be of interest not only to the historian of medicine, but also to those interested in nineteenth-century periodical culture more broadly.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.

THE ‘MEDICAL-WOMEN QUESTION’ AND THE MULTIVOCALITY OF THE VICTORIAN MEDICAL PRESS, 1869–1900

Alison Moulds iD

From the late 1860s to 1900s, the British medical press was preoccupied by debates about the suitability and propriety of women studying and practising medicine. Rather than presenting a unitary or fixed opinion on the ‘medical-women question’, however, the journals illustrate divisions and dissent. Editorial opinions on the matter—expressed in leading articles and news coverage—were often strident, but were also revised and even reversed in later issues. Discussions of the medical-women movement also featured elsewhere in the journals, in transcripts of debates among professional bodies and correspondence pages. This enabled a range of individuals—professionals and laypeople, men and women, supporters and detractors—to participate in the conversation. The journals engaged with a spectrum of opinions, which reveal much about professional anxieties and attitudes towards women during this period. The medical press did not simply reflect contemporary values, however. Rather its multivalent form actively engendered debates about women in medicine.

‘The medical-women question is perennial. It knows no limits; we encounter it at every turn.’¹

In this editorial, published in 1877, the Lancet suggested that debates regarding the suitability and propriety of women studying and practising medicine had become pervasive. Readers would have been well aware of the subject’s ubiquity, given that it appeared with remarkable frequency in the pages of the journal itself. Indeed, from the 1860s to well into the twentieth century, the ‘medical-women question’ received extensive coverage across the professional press.

This article examines how the medical-women movement was constructed and contested across a range of general medical journals. It explores long-running and widely-read titles such as the Lancet (1823-), British Medical Journal (BMJ, 1857-), and Medical Press and Circular (MPC, 1867–1961), as well as shorter-lived periodicals such as the Medical Times and Gazette (MTG, 1852–85) and the lesser-known Medical Mirror (MM, 1864–70). These journals represented various professional interests and were in direct competition in the periodical marketplace.

The Lancet, founded by surgeon Thomas Wakley in 1823, gained notoriety as a bold agitator for medical reform, though its zealous tone tempered after the early decades. Wakley died in 1862, but the journal remained in the family’s hands until 1909. Until the 1870s, it enjoyed the largest circulation of any medical periodical.² In 1827, several metropolitan luminaries formed the London Medical Gazette in direct opposition to the Lancet. In 1852, it amalgamated with the Medical Times (established 1839) to form the MTG. Over its three decades in publication, the combined journal remained a leading competitor to Wakley’s journal.³ The BMJ, the mouthpiece of the British Medical Association, eventually surpassed the Lancet in popularity. It was a continuation of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal (1840–52) and the Association Medical Journal (1853–6). Its original aim was to represent the interests of provincial practitioners, but it increasingly spoke for the wider profession and soon moved its editorial operations to London. Between 1867–9 and 1870–98, it was edited by surgeon Ernest Hart. Like Wakley, Hart was something of a campaigning journalist.⁴ Another journal which gradually became more metropolitan in character was the MPC. It started in Ireland as the Dublin Medical Press (1839). In 1866, this journal purchased (and combined with) the Medical Circular (established 1852). From 1868 onwards, it was published in London, though between 1860–1901 it was edited by Archibald Jacob, a prominent ophthalmologist in Dublin.⁵

Much less is known about the MM, a London-based journal which proudly proclaimed itself an ‘independent organ’. It was edited by metropolitan physician William Abbotts Smith and later Alexander Thorburn Macgowan, who had served as Staff-Surgeon in the 52nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry. The journal’s last editor—who oversaw production between September 1869 and December 1870—was anonymous and has not been identified.

These disparate titles varied in their political leanings, editorial strategies, and tone. Nevertheless, they were united by their engagement with the medical-women question. Their response to the issue cannot neatly be tied to their individual editors or character. As this article shows, the journals represented a spectrum of opinions and a multiplicity of voices. During the period from 1869 to 1900, all these titles were printed weekly, except for the MM, which appeared monthly. This article primarily draws on high-frequency journals because they could respond more quickly to developments in the medical-women movement.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, women made considerable inroads into the medical profession in Britain and its Empire. In 1865, there were just two women on the Medical Register in Britain—Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett (later Garrett Anderson)—both of whom entered through loopholes, which were subsequently closed to prevent other women following suit.⁶ In 1869–70, Sophia Jex-Blake and several female peers fought to pursue a medical education at the University of Edinburgh. If successful, they would have become the first women to take medical degrees from a British university. It was at this time that the professional press began treating the woman-doctor question with real immediacy and urgency. Although ultimately barred from graduating, these early pioneers paved the way for reform. In 1876, the Enabling Act officially sanctioned (though did not compel) medical schools to examine women and a year later the King and Queen’s College of Physicians of Ireland became the first of the UK’s nineteen licensing bodies to open its examinations to women. Gradually, other institutions accepted women, and by 1892 there were 135 female practitioners on the Register.⁷

Rather than treating the medical-women movement as a narrative of progress, this article explores the way in which the subject remained contentious throughout the period. Since the movement advanced unevenly, the journals found it difficult to establish a fixed and comprehensive response to the medical-women question. In the 1850s–60s, the debate centred on women’s suitability for studying medicine, but it increasingly broached wider questions about where women might practise. During the 1880s–90s, attention shifted to their (un)suitability for Government appointments or work in the British Empire, for instance. At the fin de siècle, debates focused on whether they should be admitted to professional organisations such as the British Medical Association and the Royal Colleges. Across the period, the journals grappled with different implications of the medical-women movement.

Pioneering medical women have long been the subject of biographical study, but only in recent decades has the wider movement attracted significant scholarly attention. Historians have examined the experiences of early cohorts of female medical students and practitioners,⁸ while literary critics have studied the representation of medical women in fiction. ⁹ Research has begun to consider how the medical-women question was mediated through periodicals. Thomas Neville Bonner’s comparative study of women’s medical education across European and North American contexts looks at how the popular and medical press responded to developments.¹⁰ Laura Kelly examines coverage in the British and Irish popular and professional press, arguing that contemporary hostilities towards medical women illustrate anxieties about femininity and the continued investment in women’s roles as wives and mothers.¹¹ Analysing the Lancet’s treatment of the issue between the 1860s–80s, Claire Brock contends that medical men were preoccupied by the question, but that they were neither ‘coherent [n]or unified in [their] objections’. She argues that these inconsistencies reveal much about the profession’s anxieties regarding its own...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Reading Medicine and Health in Periodicals
• 1 The ‘Medical-Women Question’ and the Multivocality of the Victorian Medical Press, 1869–1900
• 2 Shaping Doctors and Society: The Portuguese Medical Press (1880–1926)
• 3 Reading Photography in French Nineteenth Century Journals
• 4 ‘Bicycle-Face’ and ‘Lawn Tennis’ Girls: Debating girls’ health in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British periodicals
• 5 Using Digitised Medical Journals in a Cross European Project on Addiction History
• Index