The article revisits the story of the watch of Sarah Jacob and her miraculous fasting, which was showcased as a lucrative spectacle in her family home in Wales, followed by her death in 1869. The Sarah Jacob case rehearses the familiar urge among Victorian English medical men to watch and detect, including a calculated drive to make breakthroughs in popular research areas of hysteria and simulation within the domain of female maladies. It also embodies a particular historical moment of London metropolitan expertise’s curiosity towards ‘Welsh culture’. Yet the article explains how the case reveals the need for medical men to turn away from the fasting girl’s bedside and, in turn, to outsource the act of watching to nurses. Shifting the emphasis from the girl to the watch itself, I argue that the function of nurses in the case has been unjustifiably ignored. Their role as mediators between the different worlds that the case brings into conflict sheds further light on the ‘clinical gaze’ and more specifically on the hierarchies of professional observations of bodies that defy rational explanations.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)