TY - GEN digital ID - 131672406 TI - Women in Medicine in Nineteenth-Century American Literature : From Poisoners to Doctors, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Theda Bara PY - 2018 SN - 9783319964638 PB - Cham Springer International Publishing :Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan DB - UniCat KW - Philosophy KW - Pure sciences. Natural sciences (general) KW - Linguistics KW - Literature KW - History KW - wetenschapsgeschiedenis KW - minderheden KW - geletterdheid KW - filosofie KW - geschiedenis KW - literatuur KW - anno 1800-1899 KW - anno 1900-1999 UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:131672406 AB - This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith. . ER -