Based on encyclopedias, medical journals, historical, and literary sources, this collection of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the intersection of women, gender, and disease in England and France. Diverse critical perspectives highlight contributions women made to the scientific and medical communities of the eighteenth century. In spite of obstacles encountered in spaces dominated by men, women became midwives, and wrote self-help manuals on women’s health, hygiene, and domestic economy. Excluded from universities, they nevertheless contributed significantly to such fields as anatomy, botany, medicine, and public health. Enlightenment perspectives on the nature of the female body, childbirth, diseases specific to women, “gender,” sex, “masculinity” and “femininity,” adolescence, and sexual differentiation inform close readings of English and French literary texts. Treatises by Montpellier vitalists influenced intellectuals and physicians such as Nicolas Chambon, Pierre Cabanis, Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, Jules-Joseph Virey, and Théophile de Bordeu. They impacted the exchange of letters and production of literary works by Julie de Lespinasse, Françoise de Graffigny, Nicolas Chamfort, Mary Astell, Frances Burney, Lawrence Sterne, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. In our post-modern era, these essays raise important questions regarding women as subjects, objects, and readers of the philosophical, medical, and historical discourses that framed the project of enlightenment.

Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

Venereal disease existed in epidemical proportions in 18th-century France and Britain. Initially regarded as the subject for jokes and boasts of Restoration promiscuity, its prevalence as the century wore on forced people to take it seriously. Linda Merians offers a detailed study of the disease.

"In Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment Lindsay Wilson takes a new approach to the social history of medicine by focusing on the key role that women played as both providers and recipients of health care during the Ancien Regime. Wilson pays special attention to three medical controversies involving maladies des femmes in eighteenth-century France: the "miraculous cures" claimed by the Convulsionaries of St. Medard, the uncertainty over the maximum length of pregnancy (and its implications for the legitimacy of heirs) and the debate over the medical effectiveness of mesmerism." "Wilson's analysis of these debates reveals how social and political concerns affected the medical community's efforts to establish an enlightened science of medicine which would, in turn, legitimize its own authority. But because the issues of legitimacy, hierarchy and authority raised by the medical causes celebres resonated so deeply throughout French society, debate extended far beyond medical circles to an increasingly engaged public. Such debate reflected a significant shift in the center of politics from the institutions of court, academy, and parlement to journals, theaters, and the streets." "Wilson's description of these debates provides insight into the forces that were transforming the family, the church, corporate society, and the state on the eve of the Revolution. She argues for a re-assessment of a period that has been all too easily categorized as an age of triumph - either for enlightenment or for repression. Her work also offers concrete examples of the ways in which sexual symbolism can he employed to maintain social order or promote change. Based on medical treatises, medical topographies, official reports, judicial documents, physicians' correspondence, and memoirs of eighteenth-century women, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment is a thoroughly interdisciplinary work that will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social history of medicine, women's studies, Enlightenment thought, and French social history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In the first in-depth study of how gender determined perceptions and experiences of illness in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Olivia Weisser invites readers into the lives and imaginations of ordinary men and women. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal diaries, medical texts, and devotional literature, the author enters the sickrooms of a diverse sampling of early modern Britons. The resulting stories of sickness reveal how men and women of the era viewed and managed their health both similarly and differently, as well as the ways prevailing religious practices, medical knowledge, writing conventions, and everyday life created and supported those varying perceptions. A unique cultural history of illness, Weisser's groundbreaking study bridges the fields of patient history and gender history. Based on the detailed examination of over fifty firsthand accounts, this fascinating volume offers unprecedented insight into what it was like to live, suffer, and inhabit a body more than three centuries ago.

Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths - about the body as witness and the body as evidence.

This book argues that the definition of femininity as propounded by gynaecological science is a cultural product of a wider, more political context.