Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine offers a singular criticism of Rebecca Harding Davis’s medical novel Kitty’s Choice: A Story of Berrytown: Although “Mrs. Davis’s style is brilliant,” as characteristic of her many stories, Kitty’s Choice “is somewhat marred by extravagance and burlesque in depicting certain classes of people,” namely physicians. Reviews are storied texts themselves. This particular 1874 review frames its narrative in terms of health and medicine as it appears nestled alongside the Health Department’s column offering treatments for gout. The column concludes just a half-inch above the column “Literary Notices,” which not only includes a review of Kitty’s Choice but also Dr. Justus Liebig’s The Complete Works of Chemistry and Dr. D. Lambden Fleming’s The Art of Preserving Health. Such a context suggests we are to read Kitty’s Choice as a work of medical fiction, and yet the reviewer considers the novella “marred” by the so-called comedic presence of a female physician. Godey’s is not the only periodical to publish a book review that mischaracterizes the genre of medical fiction. Annie Nathan Meyer was so horrified that book reviewer Edna Kenton missed the gender satire of Helen Brent, M.D. she wrote a scathing letter of critique to the editor of The Bookman, which they published: “[I]t is a little trying to have such palpable satire as this entirely overlooked,” Meyer rebukes Kenton. Meyer cites a passage from her own novel that speaks to one such “palpable” instance of satire, a scene early in the novel in which newspaper reporters scrutinize Dr. Helen Brent’s dress at a public address. The point of the passage is precisely as Meyer states in her novel and again in her letter to the editor: No one would dare comment upon “a costume worn by Grover Cleveland when he delivers an address,” but everyone scrutinizes “the details of a woman’s dress” if she appears in a position of public authority “whether at a suffrage caucus or a prayer meeting.” Society holds different standards for men and women. Satire allows writers like Meyer a means of exposing the hypocrisy in such gendered social behaviors.

The affective nature of narrative might fail for any number of reasons, resulting in reviewers like Edna Kenton missing the very purpose of these “stories with a purpose.” Something happens during the experience of reading that causes a narrative to either work upon us or leave us unmoved.