At the focus of this paper are the life and works of Dr. James Tyler Kent, an eminent 19-th century Ameri

In some instances medical problems were made subject to hegemonic control through technological innovations. Erin O'Connor, for instance, discusses the role of medical photography in helping consolidate anorexia nervosa as a modern disease entity in the 19-th century. The photographic image, by substituting a visual message for a psychiatric discussion, underscored the tendency to think of anorexia as being "confined to the surface of the body," such that "problems of subjectivity simply did not matter next to the stark fact of starvation" (O'Connor 1995: 549;555). Through the use of before-and-after images, where the wasting girls dramatically recovered their fleshy womanhood, a 19-century physician like William Gull could provide an indubitable record of the anorexic's return to health under a regimen of force-feeding, without having to consider her illness as an "idiom of distress - a somatic response to everyday life" (Parsons and Wakeley 1991).

Finally, in the instance of such supposed women's diseases as "kleptomania" and "nymphomania" we encounter strong evidence of misogynist labeling practices. In the case of kleptomania a stratum of privileged middle-class pilferers was defined on medical grounds as being impervious to the law. The diagnosis of kleptomania was an act of contemptuous patronage, in which the perpetrators themselves colluded (O'Brien 1983; Adelson 1989). More serious, however, was the diagnosis of nymphomania, for that could make a lesbian or sexually expressive woman vulnerable to corrective procedures such as clitoridectomy or cauterization (Groneman 1994).

All of these research initiatives, whether hegemonic or interactionist, help shed light upon the construction of gender within the field of sectarian medicine. Yet in the final analysis they fail to explain how it was possible for male sectarians to maintain ideologies of male dominance within such a radical milieu, right in the face of their female collegues. Certainly in the case of homeopathy, for all its opposition to medical orthodoxy, the record is larded with instances of androcentrism, and even chauvinism, where gender equality was denied in the interests of social control. Though it is tempting to pile up examples, one particularly cloying (because late-blooming?) text will serve to represent the tendency overall.

In a paper read before the International Hahnemannian Association in 1929 - published incidentally in the same volume with a case study by Dr. Julia Green - Irving L. Farr M.D. observes in connection with the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply that when misdirected the power of procreation can wreck homes and even cause the downfall of nations, "as history teaches." He goes on to claim that the likes of Professor Sigmund Freud has convinced large numbers of psychology students that "the mental upsets, seen at the menopause, occur more often in those women who have been denied motherhood, from whatever cause." Therefore, Dr. Farr concludes that in these days of "loose morals among the youth," the family physician has "a field for rearing and developing his prospective mothers," who dread child-bearing "as though it were a disease." Against this background Dr. Farr envisions the family doctor becoming

Shorter traces the rise and fall of many other pseudoneurophysiological conditions which patients, in unconscious collusion with their doctors, bargained into existence.6

Some common words found in the essay are:
Ehrenreich English, Clinic Foucault, Victorian American, Dr Jones, Homeopathy Women, Tyler Kent, Shawn Johansen, According Shorter, Paralysis Fatigue, Victorian Ameriaca, social control, victorian american, rogers 1990, medical encounter, intellectual career, construction gender, male doctors, constructions gender, remedy pictures, medical orthodoxy,
Approximate Word count = 3339
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)