Purity and pollution: gender, embodiment and Victorian medicine

Over and above the obviously shared concern with gender and medicine revealed in their titles, these two books have several salient features in common. One is both authors' Australian provenance. Awareness of historical and contemporary similarities and differences between Australia and Britain informs both Bashford's cultural history of gender and health care in the second half of the nineteenth century and Pringle's more sociological analysis of women's changing place in the medical profession approximately a century later. The vigour of social and cultural history and sociology of gender in Australian academia and of the women's health movement in Australian health care is apparent in both. And these two books also illustrate how such academic work (and feminist politics) have developed since the 1970s, and the influence of the "linguistic turn" in this development. For the central concern in both books is no longer with women as victimized patients or excluded professionals. Rather it is with women (and, to a lesser extent, men) as gendered providers of medical care (broadly defined); providers who are physically and emotionally embodied as women or men, and hence are simultaneously encoded by and potential transformers of cultural representations of femininities and masculinities. Both these books are important and valuable contributions to our understanding of the ways in which a gendered health care division of labour has developed. In Purity and pollution, Bashford argues against the conventional historiographical separation of health practitioners into the discrete categories, nursing, the medical profession, midwifery, etc., as if the boundaries between these occupations were fixed and self-evident, rather than actively constructed. Her book attempts to examine the broad spectrum of Victorian health reform and its practitioners, using Mary Douglas's anthropological analysis of changing conceptualizations of dirt and disorder and their opposites. She seeks to show how occupational boundaries and jurisdictions were constructed along gendered lines. Thus, she examines the pursuit of hygiene in its various manifestations from 1850 to 1900, as in the sanitary reform movement, the Nightingale reforms of nursing and changing medical practices, and the campaign for women's entry to medicine. At the heart of her book is the claim that the cultural association of femininity with moral and physical purity provided an opportunity for female sanitary reformers to enhance their areas of influence beyond the domestic and personal philanthropic spheres, but in ways that were still distinctively marked as feminine. Women both claimed responsibility and were rendered responsible for spiritual and physical cleanliness. At the same time, particularly with the spread of germ theory, masculine medical practice divested itself of moral and religious concerns, as being "women's" business. Women healers were both pure and, through their suspect, leaky bodies, always at risk of polluting themselves and others (as when nurses' outdoor uniforms became favoured by prostitutes). Victorian male practitioners'