Affect and Identity in the Doctor–Patient Relationship in the American South and West, 1870-1900

FAIN: FT-285840-22

Courtney Thompson
Mississippi State University (Mississippi State, MS 39762-5227)

Revision of chapters of a book manuscript on the life of Andrew Bowles Holder (1860-1896), a nineteenth-century doctor in the American south and west.

My project uses the life and work of a nineteenth-century southern physician, Andrew Bowles Holder (1860-1896), as a lens to explore the extent to which affect and identity impacted the doctor–patient relationship and health care practices in two contexts: the post-Reconstruction rural South and Indigenous reservations in the West. Holder’s archive offers a starting point for a comparative project that places the co-production of identity and health inequity in historical context through a consideration of the affective component of the doctor–patient relationship. This archive, when contextualized with respect to other archival records of southern and reservation physicians, allows for insight into the ways in which identity factored into health care disparities and the doctor–patient relationship, both historically and in the present day.