2025 Theses Doctoral

Care Work: Nursing and Writing, 1650-1800

Todd, Lilith

This dissertation traces nursing as a set of highly generative material and literary practices in the long eighteenth century. During this period, the term “nursing” encompassed a capacious set of activities from the intimate act of breastfeeding a child to washing soiled sheets, or watching over someone confined in a hospital—all aspects of what we would today call care work.

Care work has been characterized as essential and marginal, rewarding and exhausting, and at once a distinctively feminist ethic and the labor through which (primarily) women are unevenly exploited. These contradictions in care can be traced to the eighteenth-century and as effects of the period’s medical revolutions, capitalist formations, and transatlantic slavery. While these social and economic conditions can obscure the lives, perspective, and experiences of care workers in the cultural documents of the past, this dissertation contends that care work as a practice, activity, and labor manifests abundantly in how bodies are represented in literature.

The dissertation’s chapters analyze how literary texts reflect and intervene in care’s contradictory social meanings. I argue that eighteenth-century nursing produced bodily knowledge and social relationships through a set of practices that were repetitive, cyclical, and sensual, and that many eighteenth-century texts adopt poetic, formal, and representational strategies that reproduce these processes of coming to know bodies in relation to one another.

Multiple eighteenth-century genres ground themselves in sensual encounters, focusing intently on sensual experience, or give the body social meaning through sustained, effortful, writerly habits. The genres considered here include biblical epic in verse, natural history, georgic, and devotional lyric, each of which was central to eighteenth-century literary culture.

The authors represent different social vantage points on care work: the elite gentry woman Lucy Hutchinson and the working woman Mary Leapor alongside the wealthy doctor Hans Sloane and the poor yet highly educated poet-patient Christopher Smart. These authors themselves, their writing, or their literary subjects ranged geographically from the American colonies, the imagined near east Asia, the English country, and the metropolitan city.