The short story follows a woman who has been sent by her physician to a colonial mansion in the country as treatment for postpartum depression. The woman, who remains nameless, is constantly dismissed and belittled by her husband, who is also a physician. He speaks to her patronizingly and ignores her protestations that the “treatment” she is being given is making her worse instead of better. She is told not to think, and not to write, and her husband believes that since he sees no reason for her suffering, it does not exist. She is kept upstairs in the mansion’s nursery, isolated behind bars and gates that she believes to be there for children’s safety, when in actuality they function to keep her imprisoned. As time passes, the woman believes that she perceives something in the wallpaper and becomes convinced that it is a trapped woman. She believes the woman is confined behind bars within the wallpaper, which mirrors the trapped feelings that she herself is experiencing living day in and day out inside the confines of the nursery. Her desire to help the woman escape, which mounts to a frenzy, is reflective of her own desire to be free from the nursery and the rest cure.

Throughout the story, the titular wallpaper functions almost as another character as it’s brought to life in the narrator’s mind. She contrasts the vitality of the wallpaper with the “dead paper” upon which she is writing the journal entries that make up the narrative. Her fascination, and disgust, with the wallpaper drive the story as she investigates its pattern and condition, and then ultimately determines that there is someone living within it. The narrator’s disdain for the paper is obvious in her descriptions; for instance, in her first mention of the wallpaper, she writes “I never saw a worse paper in my life” (p. 793). She later writes that the print was “One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (p. 793). On the topic of its hue, she writes that “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow…a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (p. 793). For all of her disgust with the wallpaper, and its damaged and torn condition, she still finds herself fascinated by it, and this fascination turns into obsession, which later turns into madness.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” works so effectively because it allows the reader to step into the mind of a woman as she is driven to madness. The structure of the story, which is told in an epistolary format, adds to the reader’s affiliation with the narrator as there is an intimacy in reading her journal entries and being in on the secret that she is writing against her husband’s orders. This affiliation helps to build empathy between the reader and the narrator, which contributed to the concern that I felt for the woman when she slowly lost her mind. If the story helped to save people, as Gilman hoped, it did so because it made them see the human being at the center of the “illness” and “treatment,” forcing them to understand what truly happens when you isolate someone and take away their ability to do what brings them joy. We bear witness as the woman loses her mind, leaving us with an intimate picture of what the rest “cure” could truly do to someone’s psyche. Instead of viewing postpartum depression solely as a condition to be treated, “The Yellow Wallpaper” makes readers realize that there is a person at the center whose needs and voice deserve attention.

In a patriarchal era in which women’s voices and lived experiences were ignored in favor of what the men around them deemed to be “best,” “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers an important and valuable perspective – that of the woman herself. By placing the female patient’s voice at the forefront of her story, Gilman gives her narrator the agency that had previously been stripped from her, to tell the story of her postpartum depression and how the prescribed treatment drove her to madness instead of restoring her health. It is a reminder to each of us that the voice of the patient is of paramount importance in any instance in which an embodied condition is being treated. When we ignore the patient, and what they need, they are lost, pushed to the background, and left to disappear into their own metaphorical wallpapers.

Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, pp. 804.

Originally published by The New England Magazine, Boston, 1892

Image Credits
Illustration for ”The Yellow Wall-paper” by Joseph Henry Hatfield, 1892 from Wiki Commons
Book cover by Small, Maynard & Company, 1901 from Wiki Commons
Web image from Medhum

Film ReviewVideo

Obsession and “The Yellow Wallpaper” 

Rudy Malcom May 29, 2026

The film highlights the peril of love that demands possession.

In the throes of the early AIDS crisis, people began stitching panels to remember their loved ones. The panels were joined in quilts, and the quilts were joined with each other until they became bigger than a tennis court, bigger than a football field. So unwieldy it became, the giant quilt had to be broken into pieces in order to be manipulated. Chunks would tour on display. It now has a virtual existence too and is curated by the National AIDS Memorial.

In 1989, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman made Common Threads, a 79-minute documentary, narrated by Dustin Hoffman. Based on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, their film traced the stories of five people who had died through the words of their grief-stricken friends and family. The survivors describe the solace that they had derived from quilting memorial panels for their loved ones. They also refer to milestones in the disease history: the president who would not utter the word; the movie star who acknowledged his own disease only after 15,000 had already died. The five divergent tales serve to emphasize the awesome scope of the tragedy: each panel and each name must recall an equally unique and cherished life cut short. In their final scene, the AIDS quilt lies on the Mall in Washington as names of hundreds of loved ones are read by grieving families and friends.

As the drone-less but steady camera slowly pulls back high above the patches of color in the evening light, I was reminded of the famous, expanding scene midway through, Gone with the Wind, as Scarlet O’Hara picks her way through the waste of Civil War wounded and dead. Common Threads is equally political, and it too is a love story. It won the 1989 Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. I cannot help but imagine that the quilt and the film helped to generate the protections against discrimination of people living with HIV/AIDS provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law in 1990.

Stitchery, knitting, embroidery, macramé and crochet have long been significant components of occupational and art therapy for mental and physical health (Leone 2021; Youngson 2019). But they have been marshalled into numerous anti-war, anti-discrimination, pro-environment causes with remarkable aplomb, talent, and humor. Remember the pink Pussyhats from the Women’s March in 2017? Patterns for them still abound on the web. The possibly antediluvian origins of crafting protest are featured in history and fiction: recall Charles Dickens’s knitters at the foot of the guillotine (Tale of Two Cities, 1859); or Margaret Atwood’s Zillah who makes art from dryer fluff, calling it “naive surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon” (Cat’s Eye, 1988); or even Peggy Erhart’s more frivolous parking-meter protest in small-town America (A Dark and Stormy Knit, 2024).

Self-described “craft nerd,” Betsy Greer coined the word “craftivism” in 2003. She wrote Knitting for Good (Roost Books, 2008) and edited an anthology that goes well beyond knitting to other techniques and contexts (Craftivism, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014). Scholars have noticed (e.g., Moreshead and Salter, 2023; Vachhani et al, 2025). The diffuse movement has even found critics who challenge its “white, feminist appropriation of graffiti,” and seek to empower it to “evolve and become a more intersectional” practice (Close, 2018).

References 
Close, Samantha. Knitting activism, knitting gender, knitting race. International Journal of Communication 12 (2018): 23-23. 
Leone, Lauren. Craft in Art Therapy. Routledge, New York and London, 2021 
Moreshead, Abigail, and Anastasia Salter. Knitting the in-visible: data-driven craftivism as feminist resistance. Journal of Gender Studies 32.8 (2023), 875–886.
Vachhani, Sheena J., Emma Bell, and Alexandra Bristow. The Affective Micropolitics of Craftivism: Organizing social change through the minor gesture. Organization Studies 46.4 (2025): 525-547. 
Youngson, Bel. Craftivism for occupational therapists: finding our political voice. British Journal of Occupational Therapy 82.6 (2019): 383-385. 

Web image by Medhum.org

In advance of the event, Guy Glass has had the opportunity to speak with Margo Weishar about her play: 

Guy: 
Hello Margo. It is such a pleasure to speak with you. For anyone who may be deciding if they want to come to the reading, can you tell us a bit about the play and the subject matter? And about how you became interested in writing about Elizabeth Blackwell. 

Margo: 
What really interests me is people who break out of the norm. 
People who do things that are completely extraordinary, and what motivates them to do that, and what is their personal cost in doing that. 
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States, and then she had a career in promoting women in medicine. But I also wanted to show her as a human being. The only pictures we have are of an old woman, but she was a vital, curious, intelligent, daring, brave person who fought against incredible odds to get where she was. And so that’s who I really wanted to investigate. You know, we all rely on these pioneers to break barriers down so that people like me can walk through them. But what does it take from them to do that? What are the choices they had to make in your own lives to make that possible? So that was the question that really ended up fascinating me. 
 

I got a theater degree because it was something I’ve always done in my life, and I decided I really wanted to formally go and learn. And when I started working with playwright Michael Hollinger, I took a class on solo performance. 
I always loved historical fiction, and I liked plays that were based on historical women. And so, I thought I’ll look at Elizabeth Blackwell as a subject for this solo performance. I started researching and found there was a wealth of primary source information. Not only she, but also her sister Emily became a doctor, and then a lot of her other family members were prominent. There are letters between the nine brothers and sisters in collections at Harvard and at Oxford which I could read online. The more I read and the more material I looked at, the more I felt, wow…this woman had an amazing life! After I did the solo performance, I started developing it as a play. And I really liked where it was going and refined it to the point where I had a public reading at Villanova in May of 2024. 

Guy: 
As you know, I am also a physician-playwright. There are not all that many of us! Can you say something about what it was like as a doctor transitioning to becoming a playwright? Do you feel like you have a special perspective because of being a doctor?  

Margo: 
I feel like my life has had two parallel tracks because I grew up around theater and performing. My father was a scenic designer who was a graduate of Yale Drama School. I am the first and only doctor in my family. I was always that kid who was good at science, but also the lead in the play. I produced and directed the first musical production at Penn med school ever: Sondheim’s Company with a full orchestra, which we put on with all the med students. So, it was always part of my life even during my medical training, although there was a time when I had to kind of put it on the back shelf. 

As far as playwriting, I feel very passionate about telling certain stories that haven’t been told. And now as a woman who has lived a life, had a career, raised three children, and now has a grandchild, I have a lot of life experience. I felt like that kind of voice is somewhat rare in the playwriting world, especially telling stories about women. And especially about women in science. I’ve had the opportunity to play on stage Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who is credited with developing the first computer and the first computer language. 
I’ve played Maria Sibylla Merian, an artist and biologist in the 1700’s, who drew beautiful studies of insects and plants.
I directed a play about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a Harvard astronomer in the early 1900’s. I’ve always been fascinated by these incredibly accomplished women who history has ignored. I really felt like that was my impetus for trying my hand at it. I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it. But having my work read by others I could see it was starting to reverberate with people. People were liking it and I was liking what I was hearing. The whole skill was very new to me and quite surprising. 

Guy: 
One of the things I don’t think people who are outside the theater world realize is just how long the development process of a play can take. In what way do you hope the reading at the College of Physicians will help you, and what do you expect will happen next? 

Margo: 
I have another amazing mentor, Ed Sobel, a professor at Villanova and a professional dramaturg. Ed has been working with me on focusing and refining the play. And it is just an amazing thing for me to work with somebody who is so great at what he does. Because he’s asking me questions and really trying to focus on what the essential story is that I want to tell. Having good actors is another good thing. The way people say things will help me to streamline.  

And of course, the last and most important element is how it plays to an audience, somebody who’s seeing it and hearing it for the very first time, what they will come away with and whether I can achieve the emotional impact of what I’m trying to say. As you know, things can be back to the drawing board after that experience. I might hear certain things that really hit perfectly or other things I never even considered. It’s not like a novel, where you finish it, you publish it, and it goes out in the public. You can have multiple full productions before you publish a script because sometimes something doesn’t work in a production. Maybe it’s just the wrong actors. And then you go see it somewhere else and you think, no, that scene was great. You have to see it. It’s a collaborative art, and we need all those people, designers and directors, to interpret what we wrote before we can say, yes, this is the final version. 

It’s interesting. I was in London last week and I got to see a Tom Stoppard play called Indian Ink. This play had been produced 30 years ago. 
And when Stoppard went back to it, he changed the ending. 30 years later! So even Tom Stopford can say yes, I think I can do it better now. 

Guy:  
Thanks for talking to me today, Margo. And best of luck on the reading. 

Margo:  
Thank you! 

Through playful videos hashtagged #LiveLaughLexapro and #LexaproGirly, Tiktok and Instagram creators have transformed the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor into a selective, if relatable, lifestyle for the enlightened and empowered—stigma be damned. Our society is preoccupied with chemical selfhood[1], with mental illness arguably normalized to the point of sun-kissed romanticization. 

Psychopharmaceuticals receive a different treatment in the snow-blanketed mansion of The Housemaid, based on Freida McFadden’s same-named novel and directed by Paul Feig. (Spoilers ahead for the campy thriller!) 

Millie Calloway (a mostly lackluster Sydney Sweeney), who is on parole, becomes the titular live-in maid for a wealthy family. She finds Haldol, an antipsychotic, in the medicine cabinet of her erratic boss, Nina Winchester (a delightfully unhinged Amanda Seyfried). This discovery leads Millie to believe that Nina is mentally ill, confirming the story that the latter’s husband Andrew (an initially charming Brandon Sklenar) and gossipy so-called friends have been building: that Nina is deceitful and dangerous. 

In reality, Nina’s outbursts and mood swings are in part a reaction to Andrew’s abuse. But she also uses the perception that she is unstable to her advantage, exaggerating her behavior in an attempt to engineer her escape. 

By locking both of its female leads, at one point or another, in an attic room, The Housemaid alludes to the “madwoman in the attic” trope, theorized in 1979 feminist literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. In their seminal work, they explore how 19th-century women writers used their texts to resist the patriarchy.  

The quintessential example is Bertha Mason, the first wife of the eventual husband of the eponymous narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Another example: the postpartum protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” whose physician husband prescribes her a rest cure and confines her to an upstairs nursery. Her resulting insanity is an embodiment of, and protest against, the subjugation of women. As literary critic Elaine Showalter[2] writes, the madwoman “refuses to speak the language of patriarchal order.”  

Albeit to a lesser extent than Nina, Millie is also cast as a madwoman. Toward the beginning of the film, she seems anxious and hyper-vigilant, and her specific crime is kept secret, leaving her reliability ambiguous. And, at first, Nina’s freedom—her rebellion against the patriarchy—comes at the expense of Millie’s, hardly an example of women supporting women. 

But Nina’s 7-year-old daughter Cece (Indiana Elle) encourages her mother to rescue Millie, who ultimately defeats Andrew. The police officer (Alexandra Seal) notices inconsistencies in Nina’s account but, owing to a plot contrivance, investigates no further. The Housemaid ends with Millie accepting a new job, once more as a knife-savvy housemaid for an abused woman. 

Rebecca Sonnenshine’s twist-filled screenplay is highly entertaining, but it is no masterpiece. That said, we can examine The Housemaid through the lens of mad studies, a field of scholarship that places mental distress within broader social and political contexts. This approach extends the notion, often attributed to psychiatrist R.D. Laing, that insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” Bradley Lewis[3], another psychiatrist, maintains that “psychic difference from the norm” can, in some cases, be something “to celebrate.”  

Mille’s vengeance-driven crimes are ethically understandable; however, they are legally questionable, and most mad-studies scholars would likely not exalt them. But instead of pathologizing her and Nina’s actions, we can read them as efforts to combat Andrew’s patriarchal control. 

Additionally, as Lewis underscores, healthcare professionals must seek to understand how social and political forces shape the lives of their patients and center their perspectives and narratives. Had Nina’s clinicians taken her seriously, she, Cece, Millie, and even Andrew would have been spared much pain. 

Millie finds an unflushed pill in a toilet, suggesting that Nina doesn’t take her Haldol. Unlike #LexaproGang members, she has been prescribed medication against her will. Admittedly, medication can play an important role in managing mental illness, but The Housemaid emphasizes that it cannot substitute for structural change. Even if mental illness has in part been commodified by social media, the film reminds us that what is labeled madness may, in fact, be an attunement to a world that too often denies women credibility and agency—a problem that demands not merely treatment, but transformation. 

The Housemaid. Directed by Paul Feig, performances by Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, and Indiana Elle, Lionsgate, 2025. 

[1]Metzl, Jonathan M. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, Beacon Press, 2010. 
[2]Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Patricia Parker, Routledge, 1985, pp. 77-94. 
[3]Lewis, Bradley. “Rethinking Psychiatry with Mad Studies.” Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health, edited by Bradley Lewis, Alisha Ali, and Jazmine Russell, Routledge, 2024, pp. 435-455. 

Web image by Medhum.org

The latter decision unarguably constitutes a significant setback in the struggle for reproductive rights for American women, but the history of access to abortion—and a sense of what the future might hold—may best be understood by taking the long view, across cultures. In Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, historian Mary Fissell does just that. Starting with the story of an enslaved woman in ancient Greece who becomes pregnant after being hired out as a prostitute by her enslaver, Fissell presents a series of case studies. Each one illustrates how women continued to have abortions through the centuries despite changing mores, laws, the influence of the church, and the irregular availability of experienced or qualified providers. The stories also demonstrate a pattern: as women gained more social and economic freedoms, the laws governing abortion became more restrictive, with the pendulum eventually swinging back in the opposite direction to a more liberal stance on abortion.

The enslaved woman in ancient Greece would likely have faced no moral sanction for seeking an abortion—her value lies in her continued availability as a sex worker, and, in her case, a singer. Documents suggest that women in her position would have had the knowledge to end her pregnancy, most likely with an herbal abortifacient, though squatting, jumping and sneezing were also recommended methods of preventing pregnancy immediately after sex. In ancient Rome, the focus on controlling fertility was somewhat different; Roman women had greater freedoms than their Greek sisters, raising concerns about adultery, which Augustus declared as a criminal offense. With  a focus on increasing the number of upper-class Romans who would rule the growing empire, controlling the fertility of elite married women was one way to achieve this end.

Leaving antiquity behind, Fissell nimbly guides us through the Middle Ages. In an era where Christianity is on the rise, and the issue of ensoulment is linked to the experience of quickening (when the pregnant woman first feels the fetus moving), the story of Brigid of Kildare was recorded. Brigid, a holy woman whose historical existence cannot be confirmed, was said to have helped a young woman miraculously end her unwanted pregnancy (a subsequent miracle attributed to Brigid helped a woman preserve her chastity).  The Church’s codified position on abortion was still more than 500 years away and for many of these early Christians, discussions of ensoulment notwithstanding, concerns around abortion as a means of covering up illicit sex appear to have weighed more heavily than any harm to the fetus.

In early modern Europe, in some parts of the continent, abortion had become a capital crime punishable by execution, a development that reflected “a larger cultural shift that sought to control female sexuality in the interests of Church and state.”  The story of Anna Harding who went on trial in 1618 was a case in point. Against the background of a witchcraft panic, Harding  admitted to providing both married and unmarried women with herbal and floral preparations to end their pregnancies. A “confession” under torture to having consorted with a demon led to Harding’s conviction and being burned at the stake. 

Indeed, herbal preparations to end unwanted pregnancies were common to societies as disparate as enslaved women in the Caribbean, who used abortions as an act of resistance, to Victorian women of all classes who sought abortions for many of the same reasons as women do today. Use of one of the herbs best known to induce abortion, pennyroyal, persisted up through the early 20^th century, although not without risk to the pregnant woman.

By this time, the idea that life begins at conception had gained a greater hold in the United States. Hugh Hodge, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argued this “scientifically-based” premise as early as 1839, while the Pope’s 1869 declaration that life begins at conception would have been presented as divine revelation, though Fissell posits that concern on the part of European monarchs in Catholic countries worrying about depopulation and “degeneration” may well have influenced the pronouncement.

The story of Beatrice J, a Baltimore woman, who safely achieved two self-managed abortions in the 1940s through the aid of a catheter and ergot pills to induce uterine contractions, serves as a more modern example of women who had ended a pregnancy going on to administer abortions to others. In Beatrice’s case, after her trusted pharmacist helped set her up as an abortion provider, an undercover police operation exposed her practice. A trial followed, but charges were ultimately dismissed by a progressive judge on the basis that the “client”  who visited Beatrice was not actually pregnant.

In addition, Fissell points out this was not an isolated example by any means. Even in the most restrictive settings and time periods, there appears to have been a fair amount of  tacit acceptance.  In the U.S., for example, “Physicians performed legal abortions for a variety of indications, and the rest, so-called criminal abortions, went largely unremarked. In the 1920s and ‘30s, abortion providers were rarely prosecuted, whether physicians or not, and the former were at risk only if a woman died.” Moreover, once antibiotics and blood transfusions became available in the 1930s and 1940s, the morbidity and mortality associated with these procedures would have been reduced.

The presence of abortion providers who practiced under the radar persisted throughout the ‘30s and early ‘40s, albeit with some providers using their own judgement as to who was morally deserving of their covert services.  But the 1940s and 1950s also brought a more punitive attitude toward abortion in the United States. With an increasing number of arrests of providers administering safe abortions, dangerous practices became more widespread, as did abuses by practitioners, including sexual assault on clients. In turn, these tragic stories led to the underground movement of women and their allies who supported those in need, including the Jane Collective in Chicago, a group of women who risked criminal prosecution to help others obtain safe abortions. 

While the individual stories of women seeking abortions constitute the throughline of Pushback, Fissell consistently addresses the broader factors that affected access in each of the societies she describes, including eugenics, racism, nativism, and concerns about fidelity and heredity. Enslavement and labor demands, the appropriation by physicians in the 19^th century of care that was formerly the domain of midwives, and superstitions linking women’s fertility to fertility of livestock and crops, also come under scrutiny, as does the relatively recent shift of emphasis from the importance of the life of the mother to that of the fetus.

Readers might also consider the role of medical advances as factors that have altered our understanding of pregnancy, development of the fetus, and access to abortion. Among them was the development of simple urine tests that eliminate the uncertainty surrounding pregnancy, a means of confirmation light-years away from those early societies where pregnancy was confirmed by quickening. Sophisticated imaging of the fetus via ultrasound not only confirms pregnancy at an early stage, but packs an emotional punch. Moreover, the availability of medication through pharmacies and online sources for self-managed abortions, while under threat, has created a new landscape for pregnant women. This last means of obtaining an abortion, though formulated in a laboratory, suggests a new iteration of the herbal abortifacients used by so many generations past.

Pushback succeeds at being both highly readable and meticulously researched—the volume includes an extensive list of notes and references for each chapter. Fissell, who is the Inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, also writes the Substack A is for Abortion: Snapshots from the Past. As a pre-modern historian of the 17^th century, she particularly enjoys the kind of “detective work” that accompanies that study. But she was also pleasantly surprised by how much she enjoyed researching and writing on the modern period, where sources are more readily available, including data she found through Ancestry.com.

Fissell completed her manuscript before the start of the second Trump administration and aside from allusions to Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson, Pushback does not explore the ways in which abortion became a flashpoint in our most recent national elections. (A description of politically motivated anti-vice campaigns that targeted abortion practitioners and pregnant women in the late 1940s and 1950s is included in the chapter dealing with that time period.)

But in a discussion with this writer, Fissell weighed in on current data that shows more American women than ever are having abortions despite the 2022 Dobbs ruling. “Restriction has an impact and makes abortion much more difficult and dangerous to access,” she said. “But it never stamps it out.” She also cited data that suggests roughly 66% of Americans think abortion is a decision that should be made between a woman and her doctor.  

Interestingly, Fissell did wonder at the onset of her research for Pushback whether she might change her mind on the issue. In the end, she describes holding the same views as when she started.  “Given that abortion was often shameful and secret if not [completely] illegal, I was amazed by how much I was able find out.” Her appreciation for insights from the reproductive justice movement deepened considerably as well, as it informed her understanding of women in earlier societies and the use of the term “choice,” then and now, for women in untenable circumstances.

“[Choice is] something a white woman with money can afford to have,” Fissell said. “Choice [does not apply to] a struggling waitress in a small Southern town who was raped and has two kids at home, and her wages won’t even cover their care…Casting the decision as choice means we don’t understand many women’s experiences.”     

Pushback by Mary Fissell was published by Seal Press (2025).
Web image by Medhum.org.

The story, “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) tops the list of all the classic fiction pieces I used in more than three decades of teaching in a medical school. It is vivid, accessible, and moving – and it conveys important historical messages while also holding up a mirror to current affairs and professional identity. 

The Pulitzer-Prize winning-author, was inspired to write this powerful tale, following her coverage as a journalist of the 1901 trial of woman who had murdered her husband. First she wrote it as a play, “Trifles,” in which she played a role when it opened in Providence RI in 1916. The following year she adapted the play as a story. A moody thirty-minute film was produced and directed by Sally Heckel in 1980, making use of Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,” set to the music of the Gustav Holst. A rather blurry version can be found on youtube. 

On a cold winter day, Mr. Hale has found his neighbor, Mr. Wright, strangled to death in his own home. Mrs. Minnie Wright claimed not to know who killed her husband, but she had already been arrested and was awaiting charges in jail. County Sheriff Peters brings Hale, his wife Martha Hale and his own wife Mrs. Peters to the isolated. Wright home. The two wives are to gather Minnie’s clothing and see to her preserves. The men mock women’s “trifles” and jokingly tell them not to miss any clues, before they turn to the “more serious,” manly work of finding a motive. In a basket of patches destined for a quilt, the women find a strangled canary. In quilt-like fragments, they piece together the difficult life of the absent third woman. The kitchen contains many signs of Minnie Wright’s life of abuse and violence, signs that are clearly visible to the women and ignored by the men. With silent understanding, they destroy the evidence that could incriminate her.  

Considered to be one of the earliest examples of feminist literature, this story is a wonderful teaching tool. Written before women could sit on juries, it raises important issues about the discriminatory aspects of justice, the contingency of laws, and the construction of psychiatric diagnoses, especially insanity in criminal defense. Minnie’s “peers” are her female neighbours who scarcely knew her, but who easily imagine the hardship of her life and the abuse that she (and perhaps they too) suffered.  

Over many years, I had the unforgettable experience of reading this story with a combined class of law students and medical students co-taught with my law-school colleague Mark Weisberg.ⁱ All the students believed that Minnie deserved to be acquitted. But their reasons differed along professional lines, and this same difference appeared every year we taught with the story.  

The future lawyers wanted her to find pardon in a medicalized solution: they longed for an insanity defense in the battered wife syndrome, a diagnosis which did not become available until the 1970s.  

The future doctors believed that Minnie was far from insane; her actions, they thought, were taken in reasonable self-defense; they wanted a legal fix that would change the laws to allow women to sit on juries and to recognize the harm of domestic abuse. In fact, women as jurors evolved slowly over many more years at different times and places and involved several legal cases on appeal.  

The class discussion centered on why members of each group sought to preserve the rightness of their own professional canon even when they understood that the rules expressed in the story were decades out of date.  

1, Mark Weisberg and Jacalyn Duffin, 1995. “Evoking the Moral Imagination: Using Stories to Teach Ethics and Professionalism to Nursing, Medical, and Law Students”; Journal of the Medical Humanities 16. 4: 247-263 Reprinted in Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27. 1: 20-27.

An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image by Brajendra Singh

A Jury of Her Peers from Internet Archive (Open in New Window)

A Jury of Her Peers Directed by Sally Heckel in 1980

A child of unconventional, British-born parents, raised in the bucolic countryside of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, her relentless pursuit of science began in a love of animals, carrying her through two Canadian universities to a University of Chicago PhD in pharmacology and tenuous postdoctoral positions investigating the pituitaries of whales and armadillos. The research sent her to sea with grudging whalers and to inhospitable deserts by night. She married fellow pharmacologist Ellis Kelsey, followed him for his work, and became a mother of two daughters. Lack of paid opportunities for a woman scientist sent her commuting to medical school in Chicago where she obtained an MD degree in 1950 at age 36, while her husband kept the home and family together. She was working as a G.P. locum tenens and as an editor for JAMA. After a stint in South Dakota, the family relocated to Washington in 1960 where she began her lengthy career in the FDA, rising through the ranks to positions of prominence. Not long after the move, her stance on thalidomide earned her the Distinguished Federal Service Award of 1962, presented by President J​ohn​​ ​F. Kennedy. It also brought widespread admiration, mountains of fan mail, several other honours, and the resentment of male colleagues. Ellis died suddenly in 1966, but she kept working into her 90s, taking on the public-health challenges of other notorious “remedies” seeking approval. Kelsey’s fame eventually subsided but rose again in 2015 with late honours and her death at 101 years of age.  

Cheryl Krasnick Warsh​,​ who lives and works on Kelsey’s parental home of Vancouver Island, has given us a wonderful biography. With many previous publications in gender history and the history of alcohol and other drugs, Warsh is well placed to handle this vast and ​multifaceted​​ ​topic, sensitive to the misogyny of Kelsey’s century and with expertise on the nature and fortunes of licit and illicit substances.  

In twenty short chapters, Warsh divides this long life into three ​​segments– before​,​ during, and after thalidomide– and identifies her subject in three different ways. She describes “Frankie’s” early years in simple prose, reminiscent perhaps of Gertrude Stein or Emily Carr. Quirks and disputes in the Oldham home become evidence of a high-functioning, dysfunctional family. As a young woman, “Frances Oldham” delved into science studies at what would become University of Victoria and McG​i​ll in Montreal but made the ​trip ​back home every summer. She slipped into the laboratory of distinguished pharmacologist E.M.K. Geiling at the University of Chicago, when he believed the applicant was male. Despite his initial skepticism, Geiling fostered her career and supervised her doctorate. In 1937, she worked on the lethal side-effects of elixir sulfanilamide and determined that the solvent was responsible. At that time, she also became interested in researching harmful effects of pharmaceuticals on pregnancy and explored the legal protections (or lack thereof) for their consumers. With Geiling and Ellis Kelsey, Frances Oldham wrote a pharmacology textbook, one of the first in America, that went into four editions. These experiences, her medical degree and the work with JAMA were excellent preparations for her concerns about thalidomide. Now she was “Dr Kelsey,” one of two in the same home. 

Kelsey first doubted the value of this new drug when the side effect of peripheral nerve damage seemed to have been excluded from the incomplete applications and their inadequate trials. Further delay allowed for the early reports of fetal damage (coming from newspapers rather than manufacturers) to add to the concerns. While she succeeded in blocking the approval of thalidomide, it had managed to make its way into the US anyway, in the form of free samples given to practitioners sloppily engaged as researchers in shoddy “clinical trials.” Warsh carefully tracks the resultant American harm through reports of at least 56 damaged or dead infants documented in a survey of city health officers in 1962—probably merely the tip of an iceberg. She also probed the tragedy’s impact on attitudes to abortion, respect for the disabled, and increasing caution over medications. 

Beyond the thalidomide story, this biography provides a good sense of the evolving field of pharmacology and interesting chapters on the thorny history of several famous drugs–Krebiozen, laetrile, dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), artificial sweeteners, and diethylstilbestrol (DES)–and the harmful impact of Xrays on the pregnant belly. Kelsey found support from other women scientists, in particular Barbara Moulton and Helen Taussig​,​ who became her friends. 

Warsh has tapped into a wealth of sources—extending well beyond the numerous publications, FDA documents, and newspaper reports. She interviewed Kelsey, aged 99, in 2014 and spoke with her colleagues, daughters and other family members. She made excellent use of the personal papers, sorted by the pharmacologist herself with the help of FDA historian John Swann; they contain more than 78,000 items and occupy more than 100 feet of shelving in the Library of Congress. Moreover, Warsh follows the court decisions, changing legislation and rules governing not only drug approvals but ​also ​the ordering of female lives in terms of employment and reproductive freedoms. Yet she handles all this information with a deft light touch, accessible language and playful humour.  

A great read about a great scientist and a fascinating era in biomedical science. 

Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle Against Thalidomide
Warsh, Cheryl Krasnick
Oxford University Press. 
New York, 2024-03-15

Photos of Frances Oldham Kelsey from Wikicommons

Cheryl Krasnick Warsh Interviewed at Library of Congress

Shortly before the outbreak of The Great War, a young engineering student arrives at a tuberculosis sanitorium high in the mountains of Central Europe. Over the course of his visit there he will share many meals (and drinks) with some of the other patients, a group which will include among others a Catholic conservative and a liberal humanist; there will be long, leisurely after-dinner discussions of varied philosophical topics; temperature charts will be compared; and he will become intrigued by a mysterious woman who is also a patient.  

And no, this is not The Magic Mountain. 

The Empusium is the latest novel from the Nobel- and International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. The author subtitles her book “A Health Resort Horror Story,” which is exactly what it is. But it is a horror story which the author has cleverly folded into not just the setting of Thomas Mann’s novel, but the setting and certain elements of the plotline, all of them slightly altered, but recognizable. In fact, recognizing them is part of the fun of this well-plotted, rather Gothic tale. 

As the novel opens Mieczysław Wojnich, a young Pole from Łwów, has arrived at the tuberculosis sanitorium at Gӧbersdorf, in Lower Silesia (currently Poland, formerly Prussia), to be treated for his illness. There is no room at the main building, so he is assigned a room at Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he meets his fellow (male) patients, who come from various Central European cities and differing viewpoints, but who seem to agree on one thing: the general inferiority of women. Philosophical discussions, which often take place over or after leisurely meals and the consumption of a magic mushroom-laced liqueur called Schwӓrmerei, range widely over several topics (war, language, the nature of reality) but most of the time are intensely misogynistic—what is the purpose of women? Do women have smaller brains than men? Do women’s bodies belong to the State? Have any great discoveries ever been made by women? Should women even be educated at all? (Tokarczuk helpfully includes an appendix to the novel in which she notes that all of the quotes of her characters on this subject are paraphrased from quotes by well-known prominent authors of the past, from Augustine of Hippo to William Butler Yeats)  

Things at the sanitorium go badly from the beginning of Wojnich’s stay. He stumbles upon the dead body of a woman laid out on a table, who turns out to be the wife of the guesthouse proprietor, and his companions tell him surreptitiously that she may have been murdered. He hears noises—voices—coming from empty rooms, and cries in the night from outside the guesthouse. An art student who is terminally ill confides that “people die here,” and not just from tuberculosis; every November, apparently, a young man disappears in the surrounding woods, only to have his body turn up ripped to pieces. And what exactly is going on with those woodsmen in the forest, anyway? 

The Empusium works on many levels. It is an homage to The Magic Mountain, but it is definitely not a retelling of The Magic Mountain. The allusions to Mann’s novel are multiple: the pre-World War I setting at a sanitorium in both novels; the fact that both Mieczysław Wojnich and Hans Castorp are engineering students; the philosophies of Settembrini and Naphtha in the Mountain, analogous to the conservative and humanist positions taken in The Empusium; the close childhood relationship between Castorp and Pribislav Hippe (Mountain) and Wojnich and Anatoly (Empusium), in each case bonding over a pencil. And as in The Magic Mountain, there is a narrator who occasionally breaks the fourth wall; verb tenses in The Empusium shift repeatedly from third-person singular past tense to first-person plural present. These are not subtle, nor are they intended to be.  

Allusions aside, The Empusium is its own story, and a totally different narrative. It is a horror story, a revenge story, a wryly feminist tale of the supernatural set in a place hopefully of healing but also of chronic illness and the ever-present specter of death. Tokarczuk builds suspense slowly, bit by bit, with increasing tension. Almost from the beginning there is the undeniable sensation that something is very wrong at Gӧbersdorf, although it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is. Wojnich often has the feeling that he is being watched. The story line draws from a tradition of folk horror, and specifically from the notion that bad things can happen to “city people” when they are out in the country, among the “old ways.”  

The Empusium is also more than just a horror story, and an important aspect relates to the misogynistic attitudes mentioned earlier. Tokarczuk takes a position on the nature of male-female relations (perhaps the use of a sanitorium as the setting is meant to suggest that misogyny is an illness infecting educated society). In this book “civilization” seems to be identified with maleness, and maleness is located in the sanitorium and the guesthouse, a controlled environment with its dining rooms and drawing rooms and intellectual conversation—and in the medical world, since this is a facility for medical treatment— and it is here that women are demeaned. The forest, on the other hand, is the home of the Tuntschi, female figures created by laborers out of sticks and moss and other forest detritus. It is a place both beautiful and enchanting—and dangerous. Men venture into the (female) forest, and the forest—in the form of the Schwӓrmerei, which Wojnich describes as redolent of mushrooms, moss, and earth—is brought into the guesthouse; boundaries are porous. Male and female, the guesthouse and the forest each have their secrets…and Wojnich is the last to know. But Wojnich has a secret of his own.   

And the title? A word created by the author. Empusa, in Greek mythology, was a shape-shifting female spirit who seduced young men, drank their blood, then devoured them.  

The Empusium
Olga Tokarczuk 
Riverhead/Penguin Random House, New York, 2022 
302 pp. 

Web photo by Marek Piwnicki