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SENTIMENTAL MEDICINE: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY.(Critical Essay)

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From: Studies in American Fiction
Date: 19990922
Author:Traister, Bryce

In his 1861 novel Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, Oliver Wendell Holmes brings snakes and doctors together in a story that links the plight of a young snake-girl to the construction of a modern-day physician. As readers of what Holmes would later call his "medicated novel" will recall, the heroine of the story, poisoned in utero by rattlesnake venom, is a hybrid of snake and human, and the novel theatrically keys her depiction to this unusual biological constitution.(1) Elsie, "an apparition of wild beauty," psychologically fascinates and physically repulses her onlookers in ...

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