
Making Women's Medicine Masculine Challenges The Common Belief That Prior To The Eighteenth Century Men Were Never Involved In Any Aspect Of Women's Healthcare In Europe. Using Sources Ranging From The Writings Of The Famous Twelfth-century Female Practitioner, Trota Of Salerno, All The Way To The Great Tomes Of Renaissance Male Physicians, And Covering Both Medicine And Surgery, This Study Demonstrates That Men Slowly Established More And More Authority In Diagnosing And Prescribing Treatments For Women's Gynaecological Conditions (especially Infertility) And Even Certain Obstetrical Conditions. Even If Their 'hands-on' Knowledge Of Women's Bodies Was Limited By Contemporary Mores, Men Were Able To Establish Their Increasing Authority In This And All Branches Of Medicine Due To Their Greater Access To Literacy And The Knowledge Contained In Books, Whether In Latin Or The Vernacular. As Monica Green Shows, While Works Written In French, Dutch, English, And Italian Were Sometimes Addressed To Women, Nevertheless Even These Were Often Re-appropriated By Men, Both By Practitioners Who Treated Women And By Laymen Interested To Learn About The 'secrets' Of Generation. While Early In The Period Women Were Considered To Have Authoritative Knowledge On Women's Conditions (hence The Widespread Influence Of The Alleged Authoress 'trotula'), By The End Of The Period To Be A Woman Was No Longer An Automatic Qualification For Either Understanding Or Treating The Conditions That Most Commonly Afflicted The Female Sex - With Implications Of Women's Exclusion From Production Of Knowledge On Their Own Bodies Extending To The Present Day.
This study investigates the historical transition of gynaecological authority from female practitioners to male physicians in pre-modern Europe. Monica H. Green, a historian of medicine, utilizes a wide array of primary sources—ranging from the twelfth-century texts of Trota of Salerno to Renaissance medical treatises—to argue that male authority was established primarily through superior access to literacy and Latinate medical knowledge. The work demonstrates how this shift systematically marginalized women's experiential knowledge, ultimately excluding them from the production of medical discourse regarding their own bodies.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars recognize this text as a foundational contribution to the history of medicine and gender, frequently citing it for its rigorous archival research. Readers often note the academic density of the prose, which is intended for an audience familiar with medieval history and medical historiography.
Page Count:
430
Publication Date:
2008-01-01
Publisher:
Oup Oxford
ISBN-10:
0191549525
ISBN-13:
9780191549526
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