Gender Issues Relative to Women's Health Care.

A realistic flick of the gender-related inequities embedded in the contemporary health- kick system must embroil knowing how they developed, particularly relative to the debt modern protocols owe to nineteenth-century health-care norms. In the nineteenth century, the mainstream view of health care valorized the knowledge and instruction of the professional physician, whose expertise was brought to bear on a unit of measurement range of active interventions in preserving or reclaiming physical and genial well-being. The physician was the subject, the patient his (overwhelmingly his) object. What has been called the "medical orthodoxy" of health care in the Victorian period held sway over the most scientifically advanced Anglo-European and American medical protocols (Hartman 176). Whatever the ailment, orthodox care tended to call for "heavy medicate medication, surgery, and harsh or severe treatments" (Hartman 176). It should also be noted that these protocols were directed toward members of the upper and place classes, who could pay sometimes large bills; the health-care options of the working classes were on a lower plane altogether, trickling down irregularly from the expert levels.

Women--that would be women of leisure--appear to have been special targets of a wide strain of drug mixtures. Bauer (157-9) cites the abundance of advertising and testimonials for tonics me

Parkes, Adam. "Lesbianism, History, and censorship: The Well of Loneliness and the Suppressed Randiness of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Twentieth Century books 40 (Winter 1994): 434-460.

ant to "cleanse the blood, tone the system, increase its nutrition, and pass a healthy condition." Although the chemistry of the tonic concoctions seems to have been imperfectly understood, what was consistent about the pattern of tonic distribution to patients is that it was united to extended supervised stays, marked by regimented health-improvement schedules, in sanatoriums or spas designed for the purpose. Such facilities were where patients betook themselves to take a variety of cures, with the desired result for women being that of curing them of being invalided.

Visitors, nonetheless if near relatives, must not be allowed when the patient is at all nervous or disturbed, and it is best to exclude about every one from the sick-room with the exception of the nurse, who should be a fitting and experienced person. . . .

---. "Sexuality, Race, and Social Control." The Yellow Wallpaper. By Gilman. A Bedford pagan Edition. Boston: Bedford St. Martin's P, 1998. 189-192

The Battle Creek, Michigan, clinic of John Harvey Kellogg was an exemplar of the type. Kellogg also produced a hefty tome of general advice to women who needed to regain their health. His prescriptions for young ladies and mothers were super specific and normative, with his object in view to crush the swearword of "chronic invalidism" associated with "gentility" (Kellogg 157). Just as exercise and suitable diet were deemed important, so a clean mind was inhering to good health. Accordingly, Kellogg cautioned against allowing girls and women to read such dangerous texts as those by Chaucer, Byron, Burns, Boccaccio, and Rabelais (161), which were bound to cause mental anguish, masturbation, and other ailments traceable to slag of mind. Women pure enough to be married and allowed to bear children were
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