Purity and Pollution

A cultural history, which investigates the ways in which many different male and female doctors, nurses, midwives, and accoucheurs were implicated in a discourse and a material practice, inescapably about the pure and the polluted.

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Like medical knowledge and practice itself, most medical histories are fascinated with the bodies of patients. Bashford examines practitioners of medicine, as well as patients, as embodied and sexed subjects. She brings together recent cultural and feminist theories on the body, 19th-century medical history and the history of gender and Victorian feminism. This is a cultural history, which investigates the ways in which many different male and female doctors, nurses, midwives, and accoucheurs were implicated in a discourse and a material practice, inescapably about the pure and the polluted.