By Laine Wood
The North Carolina region of JASNA welcomed several guests to the March 2024 meeting featuring a presentation from Professor Heather Meek. The meeting’s focus was on the epistolary account of author Frances Burney’s mastectomy in 1811. Meek’s scholarly niche is literary and medical cultures of the long 18th century, specifically the study of women’s health in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her extensive knowledge and research on the subject provided an in-depth look at cancer diagnosis and treatment in the era via Frances Burney’s pathography (a detailed history of a medical condition, as described by the patient) and gave guests insight into how the diagnosis and treatment was experienced by both the patient and the treating physicians.
Burney’s account of her mastectomy was sent to female family members as both information and a warning, since breast cancer could be hereditary. Her letter possessed uncommon medical insight and utilized her literary skills to weft and warp the physical, psychological, and existential impact of her diagnosis and treatment. Burney wrote that she went back and forth on whether or not to have the surgery, sometimes questioning her doctors. She was fortunate that two of her four doctors demonstrated compassion toward her anxieties and provided support through explanations of her condition and suggested surgical remedy. The account further helps to break down the relationship between doctors and their patients and the dubious regard in which patients held their physicians. Burney was not alone in her mixture of praise and critiques of her doctors.
Meek explained that Burney’s letter was similar to other patient writings of medical care experiences, often focusing more on the anxieties, fears, and lack of medical knowledge. Patient accounts differed from—if not overtly conflicted—with physician writings, which tended to be written from a strict technical and treatment-oriented perspective that omitted patient concerns. The conflicting accounts from patient and physician sometimes put the two in opposition and created potential power struggles. Women were treated differently than men, and Burney surmised that the biggest area of difference was that women were not considered autonomous in their medical care and that for a woman to question or go against physician recommendations would render the woman appearing foolish.
The painful procedure that Burney underwent left her in an extended recovery period of over nine months, with her lamenting if it would have been better to have suffered and perished from the cancer or live the rest of her life with post-traumatic stress from the mastectomy.
Meek explained that France Burney’s account, though specific to breast cancer and mastectomy, was not uncommon. Scientific advances at the time generated general interest in medicine and there were many whose epistolary careers on the subject of medicine was nearly as prolific as others’ writings and works not related to medicine. For more of a deep dive into this subject, Meek recommended John Wiltshire’s “Biography, Pathography, and the Recovery of Meaning” (The Cambridge Quarterly, 2000), and her work Reimagining Illness (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) explores Burney and five other women writers of the long 18th century.
Up Next
In April, JASNA-NC will welcome our own Sue Scott who will share her extended AGM talk “Is My Idiolect Showing? Individualized Speech Patterns in Austen’s Novels.” In May, we’ll welcome JASNA President Mary Mintz.