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[stassaedwards]

On March 10, 1993, 31-year-old Michael Griffin, a fundamentalist with a “bad temper,” pulled out a shotgun, yelled, “Don’t kill any more babies,” and shot Dr. David Gunn three times in the back, killing him. Dr. Gunn had been walking into the offices of the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services Clinic, one of the two abortion clinics in Pensacola, Florida, where he provided care.

He died on the lawn of the clinic. According to one witness, the anti-abortion protesters who surrounded the clinic nearly every day looked on “like they were just happy.”

[stassaedwards]

“History,” Michel Foucault wrote, “is the concrete body of becoming with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells.” History is a body, but the body is “inscribed on the surface of events.” In fin de siècle Paris, the body and becoming were both frenzied and uncontrollable, subject to seizures and spells. Illness spilled out of the confines of the Salpêtrière in photography and public demonstrations and thereby entered public consciousness. In cabarets and in the café-concert, the asylum and its inhabitants were remade as spectacle, an image to be inhabited. What emerged was a distinctly modern way to interpret women and their bodies—uncontrollable, erotic, and a little mad.

[stassaedwards]

[stassaedwards]

For Fusion, I wrote about the nineteenth-century origins of the Hillary Clinton health narrative.