Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  • Charlotte Gilman, Weir Mitchell, and “The Yellow Wallpaper”

    Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived a complex and controversial life.1 A prolific writer and lecturer, she advocated for the social, economic, and civic liberation of women.1 She was also a nationalist, eugenicist, and white supremacist.1 Despite her prominent feminist role, “today, Charlotte is primarily remembered for her haunting story [‘The…

  • The Yellow Wallpaper: The flawed prescription

    Mahek Khwaja  Karachi, Pakistan Yellow Wallpaper Art: A Bowl with “The House”~ Tower, the Yellow Room. By Julie Jordan Scott on Flickr. CC BY 2.0.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her short story The Yellow Wallpaper in nineteenth-century America when gendered norms prevailed in society at large and notably in medicine. In a previous article, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman,…

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, apostle of women’s liberation

    In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote much about the state of women in society, publishing the still widely acclaimed short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). She also wrote other essays, somewhat colored by her own life experiences. Her father had left his family when she and her brother were…

  • The benefit of literature to a medical student

    Martin Conwill United Kingdom   In a letter to Benjamin Bailey in 1817, John Keats, who only one year prior was a medical student himself, wrote: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination – what the imagination sees as beauty must be truth.”1 This proclamation…

  • Feminist epistemologies in A Woman Under the Influence

    Heather StewartLouisville, Kentucky, United States In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrative presents a woman presumably driven to the point of insanity by her gendered social role and restriction to the domestic sphere. This story represents a fictional account of the problems of pervasive and unchallenged gender norms, problematic gendered…