Sex and Suffering
Women's Health and a Women's Hospital
Paperback Edition
A vivid social history of health and disease, medicine and nursing, and the intimate lives of ordinary women.
Awards
Victorian Community and Local History Awards, Best Publication 1999
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award, Non-Fiction 1999
Shortlisted for NSW Premier's History Awards, Community and Regional History Prize 1999
Opinion
"Who else but Janet McCalman could turn a long, detailed history of a hospital into an absorbing read?. . .If you start to read this book you will want to continue and at the end you will have a new, valuable perspective on social history." (Judith Gooden, University of Sydney, Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Vol 4, No 2, 2000
Janet McCalman 'has turned the medical records and casebooks of the Royal Women's Hospital into a vivid and intimate history of the conditions under which women have been delivered of children since the 1850s.' (Gideon Haigh and Mark Davis, Age, August 1999)
"All of us interested in sex, in suffering, in Melbourne and - perhaps most importantly, in learning from the lessons of history - owe Janet McCalman a very sincere debt of thanks." (John Funder, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol 70 No 1, June 1999)
About this Title
Sex and Suffering is a ground-breaking work. It tells the often shocking story of women's desperation to gain control over their lives and their health, and of medicine's struggle to comprehend and manage the mysteries of nature.
It offers a graphic and revealing history of childbirth in Australia; of the medical care of women; of nursing and gender roles; and of the impact of immigration on Australian society.
Remarkably, thousands of detailed case notes, from the 1850s to the 1930s, survived intact at the Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne. For the first time in the English-speaking world a historian was allowed to work directly from these confidential patient records.
Janet McCalman vividly recreates the lives of patients and the daily work of a hospital. She enables readers to follow the institution through times of growth and economic depression, through the grim history of criminal abortion, and through the inspiring story of medical science and surgery since the coming of anaesthesia.
Sex and Suffering is a vivid and absorbing social history of women's health, seen through the work of Australia's oldest women's hospital.
About the Author
Dr Janet McCalman is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for the Study of Health and Society at the University of Melbourne. One of Australia's leading social historians, she is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her two previous award-winning histories of Melbourne private life are Struggletown (MUP, 1984) and Journeyings (MUP, 1993).
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