The Personal is Historical
Welcome to the Nursing Clio Mini Syllabi Series! We’ve been publishing essays since 2014, and with over 1,800 essays, we’ve assembled an incredible database of histories of gender and medicine. These are all Open Educational Resources, assigned in classrooms across the U.S. With that in mind, we’re launching a new series in which our editors pull together essays and other OERs into mini syllabi. We hope these will be useful for imagining new ways to use our essays and for inspiring new essays.
Syllabus #1: The Personal is Historical
One of Nursing Clio’s strengths has always been creating space for writers to historicize their experiences. This “syllabus” engages Carol Hanisch’s idea that personal experience and larger social and political structures are connected through the powerful stories that our writers have written out of the well of their own experiences. This selection of essays engages some of those larger social and political structures: racism and reproductive justice, the politicization of pregnancy, abortion access, disability, and aging.
- Udodiri R. Okwandu, “‘If they were white and insured, would they have died?’: Contextualizing the 2022 Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Report” and Megan Spencer, “The Season of NICU” each assess increasing infant mortality rates – where racism, misogyny, and the politics of pregnancy intersect.
- Katherine St Arnaud, “’Help, I’m Living in My Research!’: Writing on Abortion in a Post-Roe World” and R.E. Fulton, “The Good Friday Abortion Sermon; or, Why I Study Abortion History” explore the academic study of abortion in a political moment when abortion protections have been invalidated by a hostile Supreme Court.
- Sarah Swedberg, “How To Be a Reproductive Justice Clinic Escort” shares the author’s experience with offering protection and companionship on the walk to clinics that provide abortions, and the broader context for why these programs are needed and how we got to this terrifying moment in reproductive healthcare.
- Agnes Arnold-Forster, “The Strange Nostalgia of Childbirth” and Megan Betz, “Scheduling My Miscarriage” offer two very different experiences of pregnancy’s end, and the broader political, social, and physical factors that can shape pregnancy.
- Shannon Withycombe’s “Discharged Well; or, How I Learned to Feel in the Archive,” offers a beautiful perspective on how changes within an historian’s personal life can shape her/their/his historical analysis and enrich engagement with even previously examined sources (in this case pertaining to hospital records of miscarriages and stillbirths).
- Carrie Adkins, “An Imperfect Abortion Story.” Honest, powerful, and intense. Adkins reflects on her life history.
- Rebecca Epstein-Levi, “Neurodivergence is Not a Moral Defect” and Anya Jabour, “Disability (and) Politics: The Fetterman Fiasco of Fall 2022” each respond to public discourses within politics about disability.
- Helen King, “Another Year, Another Body Part” frames the experience of aging (with all the associated aches, pains, and malfunctions) within embodied histories of “getting old” – something that few are ever truly prepared for in a society that actively avoids aging and underprepares us for aging.
- KC Kvasnička-Slack, “Bodies of Uncertainty” examines the cultural fear of the identities she embodies: fat, queer, and trans.
Featured image caption: A woman giving birth in an elaborate room aided by a midwife and a nun and surrounded by her husband and family. Engraving by A. Bosse, between 1610-1676. (Courtesy Wellcome Collection)
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