![]() 7 Rather fewer have considered how formulations of gender informed the cultures of medicine itself. ![]() Take, for example, a contemporaneous account of medical practice in Ireland in which the author claimed that “such a number of my pupils have been cut off by typhus fever as to make me feel very uneasy when any of them take a dispensary office in Ireland I look upon it almost as going into battle.” Finding that over 300 hospital and dispensary officers had died from typhus or other such diseases in the twenty-five years up to 1843, the author suggested that the “mortality among men in the prime of life … is equal to the mortality in battle, and from wounds received in battle, during actual war.” Such facts, he argued, would have a bearing not only on the appropriate remuneration of medical service but also “on the necessity of providing pensions for the wives and families of those who may fall before pestilence in the discharge of public duties,” for “medical men who fall by fever are as entitled to pensions for their surviving relatives as soldiers who fall in battle.” 6Įver since the 1980s, feminist scholars and women’s and gender historians have paid increasing attention to the ways in which medical knowledge about the body has shaped, informed, and intersected with wider understandings of gender identity, relation, and difference. Lynch may be striking in its consistency, but it is far from unique for the period. The language used by Chadwick and Southwood Smith in recounting the noble life and tragic death of Dr. 2 Speaking to a meeting of the subscription committee, Edwin Chadwick asserted the claims of his family based on the fact that “the service in which Dr Lynch fell was a public service” and that “this service, against ravages greater than the ravages of war is, when closely pursued, attended with dangers really greater than those of military service.” 3 He called those who had died treating the poor “fallen martyrs” who had “exhibited the most heroic virtue for it was heroism of the highest kind to face certain danger without the stimulus of either excitement or glory.” 4 Chadwick’s associate, Thomas Southwood Smith, made a similar point: “Of all the professions, the members of the medical profession are the shortest lived … because while the situation of the other learned professions is that of ease and safety, many of the members of the medical profession are engaged in a service as dangerous as that of the officers of the army in time of actual war.” 5 In the following weeks, Lynch’s friends and fellow sanitary reformers arranged a subscription fund to provide for his wife and three children. He left, the report stated, “a widow and young family to deplore his untimely death.” 1 Lynch, who was only thirty-eight, had died of a severe inflammation of the throat, the result of a typhus fever contracted in the course of his work with the sick poor of the West London Union. On 26 June 1847, the Lancet carried a notice announcing the death of the physician Jordan Roche Lynch at his house in Farringdon Street, London.
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