Narin Hassan
Narin Hassan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she teaches courses in Victorian literature and culture, postcolonial and gender Studies, and the history of medicine. She is the co-editor (with Tamara Silvia Wagner) of the book collection Consuming Culture: Narratives of Consumption in the Long Nineteenth Century 1700-1900 (Lexington Books, 2007) and has articles published and in progress addressing women travelers, nineteenth-century sensation fiction, postcolonial writers, and Victorian wet nursing.
She is currently in the final stages of a book project, “Foreign Bodies: Women, Travel and the Culture of Colonial Medicine.” This manuscript, currently under review by the Ohio State University Press, examines female doctoring—amateur and professional—in the context of nineteenth century colonialism. Analyzing the exchanges of British women with natives in India and the Middle East through the lens of colonial medicine, it argues that travel allowed Victorian women to invent and cultivate doctoring roles that gave them access to both medical and literary culture. Most studies that examine the rise of the woman doctor trace her trajectory solely within the context of British or American history and through historical documents and fictional accounts. Drawing upon more intimate forms of writing such as journals, autobiographies, and travel letters, this project demonstrates that the inclusion of women in professional medicine was impacted through travel and that writing about experiences abroad gave women the opportunity to stress their influence within the domestic spaces of empire. Through interactions with natives in domestic spaces inaccessible to men, women contributed to new medical specializations such as obstetrics and gynecology. Even before professional medical women began to travel in large numbers to colonies such as India, women travelers in a range of diverse locations began to represent “doctoring” duties they performed abroad as an extension of their domestic roles within Britain. Much of the manuscript focuses upon women’s writing, although it also addresses the broader culture of health and domestic management through an analysis of nineteenth century health guides for and by women overseas. Through these, the project addresses how medical manuals shaped notions of illness, encouraged women to become familiar with domestic remedies, and regulated the management of family health through increasingly prescriptive Western models of medicine.
At the Countway Library, Narin will be researching texts by early women doctors in India, specifically Mary Scharlieb and Edith Pechey-Phipson, and native women educated in medicine (such as Krupabai Satthianadhan and Haimabati Sen) as well as the library’s collection of Victorian medical guides, advice manuals, and periodicals.