DOMINA

by Barbara Wood ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1983

Thanks to Wood's hitch-up-a-chair story-telling ease, this Super-Doctor saga about the bootstrap career of Dr. Samantha Hargrave--from London slum to San Francisco clinic director and crusading lib/consumer advocate (1860-1886)--slides down smoothly, if sugar-coated. Daughter of a religious fanatic who allowed her mother to die at her birth for ""modesty's sake,"" Samantha is ignored by Papa, and as a street child is befriended by a local hermit--actually a scholarly herbalist, lonely and grieving for his lost family, who teaches Samantha some rudiments of pharmacology. After her father's death and the ruin of her two brothers (one is hanged), Samantha is sent to a school for young ladies where she'll assist none other than Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (when the headmistress has a miscarriage and emergency help is needed). Inspired by pioneer Blackwell, and remembering the horrors of hospital practice she'd observed as a child in London, Samantha now determines on a career in medicine--and it's on to 1870 New York, where she meets Dr. Joshua Masefield. Samantha apprentices, adores Joshua, is accepted at a Michigan medical school. But love is no go--since Joshua is a confessed morphine addict and gives her the sacrificial boot. So then Samantha meets Dr. Mark Rawlins--who will reappear at St. Brigld's hospital during her humiliating, grinding internship. And by this time Samantha has piled up grievances against the double standard in life and medicine--e.g., the dangerous proliferation of quack nostrums for female trouble sold everywhere. So she performs forbidden surgery (after practicing by slicing pillows) to save a woman from a botched abortion; she innovates (the monitoring of pulse during surgery, the use of ice to prevent hemorrhaging); after Mark disappears in a shipwreck, she gives birth and then loses Mark's child, raises a deaf girl, performs wonders with the scalpel and surgical thread, acquires a devoted following and presses on--to a model clinic for women, a court fight against patent female ""tonics,"" and Love. (In pop-fiction, remember, all that sinks is not necessarily lost.) For those not already tired of the Woman Medico routine: just what the doctor ordered for lib/medical recreation.

Pub Date: June 1, 1983

ISBN: 059543326X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION