Fictional and Historical Women Physicians

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND GENDER

Elizabeth Phelps, Doctor Zay

Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine, 90-143

Sue Wells, excerpt from Out of the Dead House

Assignment 2: Fictional and Historical Women Physicians

Write a well-developed (approximately 500-word/5-paragraph/2-page) essay using appropriate examples from the

following texts: Phelps’s Doctor Zay and Morantz-Sanchez’s chapter (and if useful to you, the excerpt from Wells’

Out of the Dead House and the readings on history of science by Noble and Rossiter).

Write (at least two) double-spaced, typed pages (approximately five paragraphs) analyzing Dr. Zay’s personal and

professional choices as they replicate and/or resist cultural ideas concerning gender and science presented in the readings

noted above.

You might find the following questions helpful as you frame your thesis and argument:

How accurate is Phelps’s fictional representation of women doctors in light of the arguments put forth by Morantz-Sanchez, Wells, and other cultural historians?

How does the novel acknowledge, reinforce, or resist dominant ideas about the roles of men and women? of

ideologies assuming gender differences and hierarchies? of the roles theory and technology play in medical care?

What can the contemporary reader learn from the nineteenth-century cultural values and issues represented in these works?