Early in Annie Nathan Meyer’s medical novel Helen Brent, M.D. (1892), the titular woman physician Dr. Helen Brent examines her future protégé, Lotus Bayley, as a patient when Lotus’s mother brings her to the clinic for what she considers the signs and symptoms of “nervous prostration.” Mrs. Bayley offers a litany of complaints on behalf of her daughter, all of which underscore Mrs. Bayley’s discomfort with her daughter’s choice to attend college and study chemistry: “‘She is very headstrong,’” Mrs. Bayley reports, “‘and she will persist in going on with those ridiculous studies of hers,’” causing her to not eat well and grow “round shouldered and pale” from poring over books. Even in 1892, before an audience of white male physicians, Mrs. Bayley’s complaints would be considered legitimate and would be further legitimized by a patriarchal medical authority who considers deviant social behavior a sign or symptom of disorder. Physician and author of medical advice literature Dr. Edward H. Clarke popularized the belief that young women suffer from nervous prostration, or hysteria, when the minimum standards that society requires for academic and professional success are too rigorous, given that the female sexual system demands more energy to perform its expected functions, namely menstruation, ovulation, pregnancy, and lactation. Clarke’s treatise Sex in Education (1873), which cites case studies of hysteria among Clarke’s own female patients as evidence for the need of a “separate spheres” education system, was so popular that it sold out little more than one week after publication and prompted an additional sixteen editions over the course of the next two decades.

Importantly, Clarke does not argue that the sex organs unique to the female body inherently disable her as a mature woman, a characterization that historians Ben Barker-Benfield, John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller, and Mary Spongberg, among others, espouse in their arguments that nineteenth-century medical theory and practice was foremost a social science. Literary historian Kyla Schuller updates this impression in her recent study, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Nineteenth-century scientists actually theorize the body as a “biocultural formation” that is molded by both material and cultural processes. Our twenty-first-century scholarly impression of biological determinism as dominating nineteenth-century scientific discourse persists because of a long-standing commitment to social constructionist frameworks rather than a negotiated framework that accounts for theories of social construction, materiality, and affect.