Medicine and Health

Hypatia includes a range of materials relating broadly to issues around health.  

Some of these can be found in the ‘domesticity’ section, and, such as works by famous Victorian advice writer Mrs Beeton, were designed to be used by wives and mothers to provide practical healthcare at home. There are also a large amount of texts dedicated to making home remedies in this section, that were designed for or written by women.

There are also more recent practical health guides, dedicated to general health tips for women, as well more specific issues such as fertility, maternal health and midwifery, gynaecology  and abortion. There is also material related to specific diseases and conditions, such as Anorexia, HIV/AIDS, and Cancer. There is also material related to specific sexual diseases and conditions, such as HIV/AIDS. More general advice surrounding how women could maintain a healthy marital sex life can also be found, including personal information about experiencing the menopause, frigidity and premature ejaculation.

The collection also includes material that deals with women working in the medical profession, particularly in the ‘Health’ section. In addition to general texts charting women's work in healthcare and medicine, there are biographies of key figures such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor and surgeon in Britain, and Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. Furthermore, there are diaries and memoirs that chronicle the real life of experiences of British female medics, including those working abroad in such places as Russia and China. The material on nursing (to which we have provided links to only a very small sample) is a particular strength of the collection as a whole.

There’s also some interesting fiction related very generally to medicine and healthcare; in addition to texts like the Victorian sensation novel The Doctor's Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, there’s also some romance novels from the 1950s about a lonely doctor!

There is also material related to specific sexual diseases and conditions, such as HIV/AIDS. More general advice surrounding how women could maintain a healthy marital sex life can also be found, including personal information about experiencing the menopause, frigidity and premature ejaculation.

Kim Tolkien

Dr Kay Nias