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Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection

by Katharine Park

parkToward the end of the Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote increasing attention to what they called “women’s secrets,” by which they meant female sexuality and generation.  At the same time, Italian physicians and surgeons began to open human bodies in order to study their functions and the illnesses that afflicted them—a process that culminated in Andreas Vesalius’ great illustrated anatomical treatise of 1543, On the Fabric of the Human Body.  Katharine Park traces these two closely related developments through a series of case studies of women whose bodies were dissected after their deaths between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries: an abbess, a lactating virgin, several patrician wives and mothers, and an executed criminal.

Secrets of Women explodes the myth that medieval religious prohibitions hindered the practice of human dissection in medieval and Renaissance Italy, arguing that female bodies, real and imagined, played a central role in the history of anatomy during that time.  The opened corpses of wives and mothers yielded crucial information about where babies came from and about the forces that shaped their vulnerable flesh.  In the process, what male writers knew as the “secrets of women” came to symbolize the most difficult challenges posed by human bodies—challenges that dissection promised to overcome.  Thus Park demonstrates the centrality of gender to the development of early modern anatomy through a study of women’s bodies and men’s attempts to know them and, through them, to know their own.

Citation for Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women and Science Prize awarded by the History of Science Society (2007):

Katharine Park’s Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection is an outstanding demonstration of the fundamental insights that consideration of gender brings to the history of science. The womb, Park shows, became the privileged object of dissection in medical images and texts in the 15th and 16th century due to both its significance for generation and the challenges posed by its anatomical complexity. Whereas depictions of male anatomy focused on the outside of the body, the female figure came to illustrate internal anatomy in general. Far from being an aberration, then, women’s bodies and their secrets became the paradigm for the secrets of life, and were crucial for the development of anatomical knowledge from the thirteenth century until Andreas Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body of 1543. In this exciting challenge to existing historiography, Park traces the role of women and the female body through several Italian case studies: a religious visionary, a lactating virgin, Florentine matrons, and the executed criminal of Vesalius’s famous frontispiece. While leading her readers into discourses and practices quite remote from contemporary experience, Park challenges well-established opinions about religious prohibitions against dissection, the transgressive nature of physician’s desire to understand women’s secrets, the misogynous motivation of Renaissance doctors’s critique of vernacular midwives’s knowledge, and the “one-sex” model of the human body previously assumed to characterize anatomical understanding from Galen to the Enlightenment. Katharine Park does all of this in a book that is richly documented, lucidly argued, soberly provocative, and both fittingly and beautifully illustrated.

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