Healing and the Hunger Games
Healing is a recurring theme in the Hunger Games. The ways in which medicine (ranging from wild herbs to high-tech ointments and cosmetic surgical procedures) is used changes according to class and gender. To me, this relates to the way medicine has been practiced based on class and gender.
Katniss’ mother is a healer, and her sister, Primrose, seems to be becoming one too. Many people in District 12 turn to Katniss’ mother for help with their sicknesses and injuries. She’s taken as an authority because she has the knowledge and experience necessary to help them. People are treated on their kitchen table in the Seam.
In the Capitol, the little that we see of medicine is high-tech and complicated. After the Games, Katniss and Peeta are completely anesthetized and their bodies are “redone” by nameless doctors and surgeons in lab coats. Katniss’ hearing in her left ear, made deaf by a bomb blast, is even restored.
In our world, healing came from a women’s task to a men’s profession. This is shown most clearly in the field of obstetrics. Midwifery, once a respected, yet low-paid task, held only by women, has been mostly replaced by obstetrics, which introduced men into the field and subsequently raised the pay and turned it into a profession. Medicine went from the familiar—a local & experienced, but also maybe not so well trained, doctor—to the unfamiliar—hospitals with many specialists.
Medical care also differs by class, race, and sex. While class has an obvious impact on the quality and accessibility of care one can receive, race and sex can also have more subtle impacts on treatment. Studies have shown that women and minorities often get sub-standard care because their questions and health conditions simply aren’t taken as seriously by doctors (an extreme example of this is in the case of Henrietta Lacks, a woman who was told very little about the cancer that ultimately caused her death).
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2 Comments
caroline
September 26, 2013A dynamic similar to the male OBGYN/female midwife is male doctors and female nurses. Traditionally, men have become doctors and women are nurses. Recently this has been changing, with more and more female doctors, but not as many male nurses. It is interesting that in this case women seem to be able to cross the invisible boundary from the past, but men have greater difficulty crossing this line.
Unfortunately I have also read that the health of women and girls in many third world countries is not considered as important as the health of men and boys. In many families in some countries, people will not spend money on medicine if their daughters get sick, which is why female children have higher mortality rates. If their sons get sick, though, most families will do all they can to obtain medicine.
In the Hunger Games I don’t see any gender issues like this – it seems that Suzanne Collins stayed away from those topics and I’m not sure why. Maybe because she was focusing on other things to critique, but I think it would have been helpful to know the genders of the Capitol doctors, whether they were predominantly male or female, since in Distract 12 healers seem to just be female.
Kaitlyn O'Hagan
October 6, 2013“it seems that Suzanne Collins stayed away from those topics and I’m not sure why.” I completely agree (and would note she stays away from racial “issues” as well! I wonder if she wanted to simply focus on her critique of class stratification–which seems to be a growing trend in contemporary society, where class privilege and difference has become what many identify as the root or even sole cause of inequality. I actually find this trend really problematic, because it seems then that the continuing discrimination rooted in race and gender is more easily obscured, dismissed, or ignored.
Or, perhaps as I mentioned in another comment, the novel could be read as pointing out that the (worthy) goals of gender (and race) equity are not going to solve all of society’s problems, and we can in fact end up with a society where there is racial and gender equity that is in fact, overall, worse than our current situation.
[Yes, I’m writing with the assumption that it’s agreed the society Collins depicts does in fact have racial and gender equity. While I myself am not sure this is the case, I do think it’s what she was going for.]