Ars medica. Art, medicine, and the human condition

gaining control over midwifery in part by reinterpreting pregnancy to be a disease, hydropathists sought to restore an older definition of childbirth as a natural process over which women themselves had substantial control. Water-cure doctors were committed to the prevalent reformist belief in the perfectability of humanity, but maintained that sound health was a prerequisite to social redemption. Man needed to overcome the physical (not just moral) degeneration to which middle-class Americans had fallen prey before a healthier social order could ensue. And accordingly, woman-burdened further by pregnancy and protean "female complaints"-was doubly bound to guard and improve her own health, for female invalidism was seen as a leading obstacle to expanding women's sphere and attaining women's rights. More than this, if, as hydropathists believed, sound health was necessarily the first step toward the broader regeneration of American society, then women as the guardians of family health were key targets for hydropathic proselytism. Hydropathists were also singularly supportive of women as health lecturers and physicians, and set up medical schools for students of both genders that granted among the earliest MD degrees received by women in America. Donegan's elaboration ofthese themes is so detailed that, perhaps inevitably, the reader might willingly have seen some of the space now devoted to multiple examples given over instead to probing new issues. There is virtually nothing on the course of hydropathy in Europe after its initial transplantation to America, yet comparison could have greatly clarified what was-and was not-peculiarly American about the place of women in the story told here. Also, the author stays close to the surface in analysing the hydropathic rhetoric she quotes so fully. Railings against "science" as an oppressor of humanity in general and women in particular were commonplace in water-cure pronouncements, yet precisely what science meant to hydropathists or its standing in the romantic cult of nature of which hydropathy was one expression is unexamined. Nor does the author deconstruct and assess the tacit identification of science with masculinity and nature with femininity that pervaded hydropathic writings. Here perhaps, the work of the present-day gender theorists who have explored feminist alternatives to a putatively masculine natural science could have productively informed the analysis. Still, the fact that the reader wants more simply underscores the richness of the topic Donegan has taken on. This volume stands as an important contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on the gender politics …