#BlogTour ‘The Physician’s Daughter’ by Martha Conway

About the book…

It is 1865, the American Civil War has just ended, and 18-year old Vita Tenney is determined to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a country doctor like her father. But when her father tells her she must get married instead, Vita explores every means of escape – and finds one in the person of war veteran Jacob Culhane. Damaged by what he’s seen in battle and with all his family gone, Jacob is seeking investors for a fledgling business. Then he meets Vita – and together they hatch a plan that should satisfy both their desires.

Months later, Vita seemingly has everything she ever wanted. But alone in a big city and haunted by the mistakes of her past, she wonders if the life she always thought she wanted was too good to be true. When love starts to compete with ambition, what will come out on top?

Massive thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for the blog tour invite and publishers Zaffre for the gifted review copy of ‘The Physician’s Daughter’ which is available in hardcover from March 2022.

”Higher education in women produces monstrous brains and puny bodies, abnormally active cerebration, and abnormally weak digestion, flowing thought and constipated bowels”

Dr E.H Clark , 1873

I was left reeling by the quotes and books which precede each of the chapters in The Physican’s Daughter, and went online to look them up for myself (yes, all are true) and came across the above quote from, ironically, a book named ‘Sex Education’.

The notion that women are physically and mentally changed by receiving an education is something that I believe was left in the past, and it is horrifying when you are faced with what was a commonly held belief by men and women alike. Women knew their place, as evidenced by the pushback Vita gets from her sister, Abigail (the pretty one and not the shrew, as she is known as) and her mother, Mitty.

Vita’s entire family is left reeling after the death of the only make child in the family, Freddie, who died due to medical negligence-sepsis following an infected bullet wound-fighting in the American Civil War. Their father, Dar, is unwilling to let Vita train as a doctor, her job is to go and get married, and have children without argument. The irony that they are trying to enslave their eldest daughter in unwanted matrimony after winning the war against slavery is not lost on this reader.

The quotes before each chapter really bring it home that this was a different time, and each and every girl was raised with instruction leaflets about the opposite sex, boiled down to ‘grin and bear it and if you blow out the candle on your wedding night and are lucky, he will fall over in the dark and you can prolong the inevitable disappointment.’

But Vita has it all worked out, there are two colleges which will take and train women but, unfortunately it costs money. She has 2 options: wait till her older sister’s wedding day, and take her tuition money inheritance from her aunt, or go with what her father wants.

The other narrator is Jake , a recently returned soldier from the war who knew Vita’s brother, and who is looking to try and set up a business and establish himself in the post war world.

He clearly has what we would recognise as shell shock or PTSD as a result of what he has been through, and re-connects with Vita’s family, as they are a point of familiarity in a strange new world. As Vita is increasingly concerned and feeling trapped by her father’s plans to marry her off to massively inappropriate men, true grotesqueries, you wonder how she will ever be able to make her way to the profession she is clearly born for. Her memory is second to none, she reads her father’s journals and in flashback scenes, her brother who really did not want to be a doctor, even backs Vita’s cause. She is made for it, has a brain for it, but lacks the finances to get to be a professional.

With an unwilling father and a mother who has similarly hidden her scientific leaning in the more feminine and acceptable field of gardening, Vita has her work cut out for her!
A scheme however, hatched by Vita and Jacob might prove beneficial to both parties when she finds out just how much her father is willing to sell her ‘virtue’ for.

This novel is set in an era about which I know very little, and the little I have dug into it makes me want to read more. The notion that the role of women post Civil War was to produce children-ideally, males-to replace the lost sons stolen by death, is so alien, and feels so ancient. And yet, it really is less than 300 years ago that the first woman obtained a medical licence.

Since the 4th Century, women have refused to sit by and let themselves be told what they can and cannot do, and have disguised themselves as men to fight in battle, train to be doctors and so forth, making inroads into male professions with very few aware that they were not men.

However, it is thanks to women such as Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell in America, who paved the way for women to be seen and recognised as being able to practice medicine (not always without a massive fight about it!) since 1849. It is presumed therefore, that since that time , women are able to get a foot in the door of whatever profession they would like to be in, and yet, here we are in 2022, with 18 countries where women need permission from their husbands to work. Have we come far from the days where women would have to grin and bear their allotment in life? Yes we have. But do we still have a long way to go before there is a true sense of equality? Also a yes.

I was completely immersed in Vita’s story, it leaps off the page with richly drawn characters, a brilliant sense of timing, and purpose, as well as educating the readers of today on what it was like, and what it would take, for someone to pursue their true calling in life.

How far would you go to do what you feel is your ambition, your goal? And what strength does it take to push back against a society that not only doesn’t see you but also doesn’t hear you?

Cheering Vita on through her journey was an absolute joy!

About the author…

Martha Conway is the author of four novels including ‘The Underground River’ (Touchstone 2017), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.

She’s received several awards for historical fiction, including the North American Book Award for Best Historical Fiction.

Her short fiction has been published in the Iowa Review, the Carolina Quarterly, The Quarterly, Folio, Massachusetts Review, and other journals. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program.

Martha is one of seven sisters and now lives in San Francisco with her family

Links-http://www.marthaconway.com/

Twitter @Tr4cyF3nt0n @marthamconway @ZaffreBooks

Intersting articles on women doctors-https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-47814747

https://www.uab.edu/medicine/diversity/initiatives/women/history

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/sep/26/no-scrubs-how-women-had-to-fight-to-become-doctors