Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Feminist

  • The Yellow Wallpaper: The flawed prescription

    Mahek Khwaja Karachi, Pakistan 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, apostle of women’s liberation,” (2019) published in Hektoen International, George Dunea speaks at length on how Perkins’ writings are peppered…

  • Women in the medical profession: The trial of Jacoba Felicie de Almania

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States In November 1322 a group of folk healers and empirics were put on trial by the Faculty of Medicine from the University of Paris. Their crime was practicing medicine without licenses issued by the university. The punishment was excommunication and a fine of sixty Parisian livres.1 Among the group was…

  • Dr. Avery, Medicine Woman

    Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode, Island, United States In July 1878, astronomers headed into the American West to observe a total eclipse of the sun. Among them was America’s only woman astronomer, Maria Mitchell of Vassar College, and four of her former astronomy students. Lacking the federal support and discounted railroad tickets of her male colleagues, Mitchell…

  • Bloody women

    M.K.K. Hague-YearlMontréal, Québec, Canada Sitting with little fanfare inside a twentieth-century red hardcover binding is a single leaf whose bibliographic record contains brackets of uncertainty: “[Calendar for Austria, 1496.] [Kaspar Hochfeder, Nürnberg? 1495.]” The catalogue offers only a basic description: “The woodcut occupying the whole lower portion depicts a zodiac man, two bloodletting scenes, a…

  • Mary Putnam Jacobi, advocate for women in society and medicine

    Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906) was born in London to American parents. She spent her childhood and adolescence in New York, where she studied pharmacy before receiving her medical degree in Philadelphia in 1861. In 1866, after briefly working in Boston with Marie Zakrzewska,1 she went to Paris to further her medical training. Back in New…