Citation: Julia Dauer, “The Adelaide Brent Letters: Queer Care in Medical Correspondence,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2020, p. 132-144.
This essay and transcription examine questions of care and authority in letters by and about a rebellious young opium addict named Adelaide Brent. Brent, her family, and her physicians wrote a series of letters to Dr. Benjamin Rush, the most famous physician in the early United States, about her opium use.
The Brent letters are compelling because they record a conflict. These letters offer a glimpse into the disputes around appropriate care and trustworthy observation that permeate medical practice in the U.S. in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each letter records a perspective on Brent’s care and solicits Rush’s assistance as a practitioner who might be willing to intervene in the situation.
As they record part of the years-long struggle to define Brent’s health and control her behavior, these letters are an invitation to think about the ways Rush’s archive embeds and reveals alternative networks of care, knowledge making, and resistance.
This piece appeared in a special issue on American Women’s Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought edited by Travis Foster and Timothy M. Griffiths.