Stacey Dearing

STACEY DEARING {[email protected]} is a PhD candidate in early American literature at Purdue University. Her dissertation investigates issues of patient agency in letters, diaries, missionary tracts, and medical treatises in order to analyze how patients in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used writing and narrative strategies to shape and establish meaning for their medical experiences. Her research interests include the medical humanities, material culture, sewing samplers, and religion.

Remember Me: Discursive Needlework and the Sewing Sampler of Patty Bartlett Sessions

Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 1

In her diary entry for March 20, 1848, Patty Bartlett Sessions (1795–1892) recorded an unusual note: she had begun to work on her sewing sampler, an item she had not touched for thirty-eight years. She writes simply, “commenced to finish my sampler that I began when I was a girl and went to school.”