This collection draws on two research contexts that are distinct in their disciplinary character yet linked inexorably in the development of British culture: literature and the history of medicine. Like many of the historicist and interdisciplinary studies that have emerged in recent years, this volume aims to draw on the strengths of two forms of knowledge and their attendant methodological practices in order to provide a thoughtful and productive consideration of the ‘treatment’ of the female body between, approximately, 1600 and 2000. The positioning of women vis-à-vis the man of science is a subject that enters a busy and exciting...

Early modern interest in conception, pregnancy and labour extended far beyond medical specialists: Audrey Eccles’ study of the literature in the period 1540–1740 shows that ‘The public was evidently fascinated by the subject’.¹ Lisa Forman Cody continues the story through the eighteenth century, noting that ‘tales of the body and birth, both normal and strange’ are plentiful ‘across genres, disciplines and locations’.² Discourses associated with various professions interacted vigorously in discussions of two controversial issues: the child’s inheritance from mother and father at conception, and the power of the mother’s imagination to affect the child in her womb. Matters...

The female reproductive system has, from very early on, been cast as the riddle of all riddles, as an entity calling for confounding and astounding descriptions that only the riddle is uniquely constructed to convey. To bear and to be born, these strike one as originary elemental riddles somehow in defiance of Aristotle’s dictum that nothing can come from nothing. One of the earliest and possibly best-known recorded riddles about the mysterious uterus appeared for centuries in a Latin primer: ‘My mother bore me, and soon was born of me’. The solution presented is water and ice, which in a...

In its 12–19 December issue of 1650, Marchamont Nedham’s parliamentarian newsbook,Mercurius Politicus, recounted the startling story of Anne Greene, a 22-year old Oxford woman convicted and hanged for the murder of her newborn son, but discovered still to be alive as she was prepared for a public anatomy lecture:

Being cut down, she was put into a Coffin, and brought to the house where the body was appointed to be dissected before the company of Physicians, and other ingenuous Gentleman, who have a weekly meeting at Mr.Clarksthe Apothecary, about naturall enquiries and experiments […]. When they...

The collection and display of anatomical specimens was a particular area of interest during the Enlightenment. From 1739 until 1800 an estimated thirty-nine anatomy museums appeared in England.¹ Private individuals and anatomy teachers also kept their own collections and used specimens from human and comparative anatomy, as well as anatomical models and illustrations, for private display and for public teaching.² What is perhaps less well known is that many items found in collections centred on female reproduction. Growing interest in maternal bodies can be seen in two collections at opposite ends of the long eighteenth century. The first, depicted in...

By the end of the eighteenth century male physicians had replaced female midwives as the preferred birthing attendants among the aristocracy and wealthy middle class. How the private world of the lying-in, which derived its authority from women’s experiential knowledge of birth and reproduction, had become the domain of the male physician is a complicated and yet often over-simplified story.¹ The eighteenth-and early nineteenthcentury debates over the man-midwife illuminate complex and competing discourses surrounding the nature of men, women, and the reproductive body. Through an analysis of selected works published during this period, this essay will highlight the ways in...

In early Victorian England pregnancy and childbirth were matters of both medical and spiritual concern. In this paper I will be exploring the way in which these two realms of knowledge and discourse were brought together when a radical feminist, Emma Martin, rebelled against her religious upbringing and came to dedicate the final years of her life, not simply to women, but to their wombs. She did this by lecturing on gynaecology and practising as a freelance midwife. By doing so she was not simply rejecting religious practice for that of science, but was connecting with the female embodiment of...

In 1989 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claimed that the discipline of gynaecology emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to cultural and medical anxieties over female masturbation. Sedgwick, in her controversial article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, argued for a rereading ofSense and Sensibility(1811) that allowed for the possibility of a homoerotic, or even autoerotic, identity for the novel’s Dashwood sisters.¹ While Sedgwick’s approach might be described as anachronistic or even exclusionary (it implies that readers who cannot see in Austen’s text what Sedgwick sees have been blinded by their own heterosexist assumptions), it does present a...

In an unsigned piece published in theJournal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathologyin 1851, the anonymous author takes a moment to indulge in a fulsome description of the marvels of the female pelvis and its fleshy accessories:

It is in that portion of the body in immediate connexion with those parts peculiar to her organization that the greatest beauty of form is found in woman, as though they were thefons et origoof corporeal as well as mental loveliness […] the contours of the back are of the most admirable purity; the region of the kidneys is...

In the early to mid-nineteenth century, medical accounts of female masturbation were strangely contradictory. In the many legitimate as well as quack medical treatises on reproductive health that were in circulation in this period, female masturbation was either utterly unimportant or it was a much more devious vice than the same habit in men – and therefore a subject of the utmost importance. Some texts argued that women had little to no sexual feeling, as William Acton sought to establish inFunctions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs(1857).¹ Some included discussion of women as a minor and sidelined element of...

Through the summer months of 1858, the newspaper-reading public was both shocked and tantalized by the ubiquitous and detailed reporting of the Robinson v. Robinson and Lane divorce case. Despite the fact that this case was deemed, by the Lord Chief Justice no less, to be nothing short of ‘remarkable in its character and circumstances’,¹ few modern readers appear aware of its existence, let alone its import. Thus this chapter is, in part, an act of essential recuperation. For as was recognized, even at the time, the Robinson divorce case involved ‘large social interests […] which have a much wider...

Daphne du Maurier’sRebecca(1938) radiates contempt for most ‘types’ and for both sexes, but it seems to reserve particularly harsh judgement for women. Like its literary antecedentJane Eyre, the fairytale heroine triumphs at the expense of every other woman in the novel.¹ These women are at best caricatured and at worst condemned, often aligned with sinister, perverse connotation. From the loathsome vulgarian Mrs Van Hopper to the hideous Mrs Danvers, female presence is regarded in this novel as a threat, a dangerous encounter requiring ruthless counter-tactics and survival strategies. In no character is this dangerous horror surrounding femaleness...

The abortionist is a shadowy figure in the history of British gynaecology in the twentieth century. Before the 1967 Abortion Act, which for doctors, provided a legal defence for performing abortions, those accused, tried, and convicted of carrying out terminations were often demonized. The medical profession, the legal system, and the media regularly expressed shock and horror at the violent injury and death sustained by those women who placed themselves under the care of the untrained and unskilled. An important focus of contemporary allegations rested on the methods used to procure abortions, and the gynaecological knowledge and skills of those...

Having read the fascinating collection of essays in this volume, I am struck afresh by two fundamental and enmeshed questions: how ‘history’ is produced and what that production may be seen to offer us. For what immediately became clear to me in considering these essays together is that the constitutions of the female bodies in the texts under consideration here, from early modern to twentieth century, on the one hand provide a reading of pasts which, seen retrospectively, may often seem unscientific, ignorant, or sexist compared to our present in terms of their claims to knowledge of female reproduction and...