Plotkin, LV; (2015) "The Diseases Peculiar to Women:" Gender & Curative Space in Britain and British India, 1860-1914. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

Abstract

This dissertation examines the gynecological construction of medicalized "curative space" both as an imagined ideal and a material reality in Britain and British India, from the mid-Victorian period to the advent of the First World War. Throughout this dissertation I employ two different definitions of curative space. The first, a geographer's definition, refers to the spaces of types of sites that the medical community deems to be salubrious or inducing of good health. The second is a psychologists definition and refers to the space between the patient and the therapist where healing is allowed to occur. As the long nineteenth-century progressed, women experienced many different types of curative space in their quest for better physical, mental, and moral health. This thesis interrogates the medical rationale underpinning these different kinds of medically mandated curative spaces, with particular emphasis on the home, the asylum, and the hill station sanatorium, in order to further our understanding of how medical discourse and practice shaped ideas about the female body and influenced the formation of women's subjectivities during this time period. To provide an analytical framework for this thesis, several different historiographical approaches are discussed in the Introduction. This thesis engages with a robust body of literature across several disciplines, including new imperial history, the history of medicine, and feminist philosophy to argue that the citational practices which comprised the symptom pool of gynecological 'disease' were constructed in part by the idea, concept, and availability of specific spaces.

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