College Honors Program
Date of Creation
4-23-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Debra Gettelman
Abstract
The professionalization of medicine in mid-to-late 19th century America and Britain corresponded with heightened critical scrutiny of the ethics of doctor-patient relationships in contemporary fiction. With ethics frameworks of the century focused primarily on good fellowship between practitioners, it was difficult to charge practitioners with bad ethics. Yet, the broader debates of vivisection and women’s rights brought to light power imbalances between men and women that novelists began to suggest were present in medicine as well. Wilkie Collins’ Heart and Science weighs in on the danger of the doctor-scientist encroaching on women’s rights with the suggestion that women will be the next species on the dissecting table. Meanwhile, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a direct criticism of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who is known for his highly restrictive prescription of the Rest Cure to women with hysteria. In this thesis, I argue that these primary texts bring issues of medical ethics outside of the increasingly professionalized world to the reading public to make a call for moral medicine that advocates for the consideration of female patients’ intersectional perspectives in their care plans. While fiction is outside of these medical debates, it enables readers to inhabit the minds of immoral doctor-scientists and allegedly mad women to allow readers to determine whose psychology is truly abnormal.
Recommended Citation
Dentremont, Danielle, "Inside the Mad Mind: Medical Ethics in 19th Century Fiction" (2025). College Honors Program. 601.
https://crossworks.holycross.edu/honors/601
Included in
Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, Mental and Social Health Commons, Psychology Commons
Comments
Reader: Julianne Carmarda