Browsing all posts in The Nefarious History of Motherhood.
The Victorian Problem
Speaking of murdering abortionists… We were, weren’t we? Victorian England was an interesting place. The sexuality and sexual politics were fascinatingly confusing. In the interests of saving my readers from a dissertation, here are the Cliff notes: A wave of Protestant prudery about all things sexual swept through England in the early 19th century (and [...]
Maybe You Can’t Trust a Midwife After All
The entrenched misogyny of the Church in the Middle Ages that we have witnessed (due to the fact that the people in charge: a. were celibate males who were terrified of women who might steal their chastity, and b. were celibate males who knew nothing about women) had a few concerns about midwives. You see, [...]
Wanton Whores? Who Says?
Since time immemorial, it seems, women have been viewed as voracious sexual predators. It was taken as a given, since at least the time of Aristotle (who is said to have originated the idea but was probably just writing down the accepted wisdom of the time). Through Aristotle, it became known to the medieval Christian [...]
Is that Queen Victoria on your Medicine Bottle?
The 1880s were a great time to make a fortune in snake oil. The “patent medicine” business really took off at the end of the 19th century. Let’s face it–conventional medicine had not a whole lot to offer. Bleeding, mercurials, radical surgeries… Can you blame folks for checking out the competition? This is the age [...]
Penis Envy
To a modern woman, the whole idea sounds absolutely absurd. But to a woman in Freud’s world, the toxic combination of intellect, ambition and lack of male member must have made it very, very real, although in a way Freud hadn’t really intended. Doctors were casting about desperately for something, anything, to fill the theoretical [...]
At the Salpetriere
In 1656, Louis XIV built a hospital on the site of an old gunpowder factory. It unfortunately retained the name, so it became the “Hospital of the Gunpowder Factory”, l’Hospice de la Salpetriere. The implication that the place might have been a powder keg was fascinatingly prescient. It was not just a women’s hospital. It [...]
It’s Not Sex. No, Really.
The 19th century was a great time to be a physician. That new-fangled scientific method was fast and furiously pumping out massive advances in anatomy, physiology, bacteriology, and surgery, which were both broadening physicians’ purviews and creating subspecialization. No one could possibly keep up with every area of the massive progress, so why not pick [...]
You Say Hysteria, I Say…???
Hysteria is a very complex topic. It has been examined exhaustively by historians of medicine, social historians, feminist historians, feminists, sociologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychiatrists… Here’s the thing–not any of them agree on what hysteria actually was. Or is. Or might have been. Or probably wasn’t. They do agree on one thing–Hippocrates was wrong. Hippocratic tradition [...]
Mesmerizing Medicine
In the first half of the 16th century, the great anatomist Vesalius noted that Hippocrates did no dissection, at all, and Galen did his on monkeys. In other words, they might be wrong. He shortly went about proving that they were. News of this catastrophe spread like…glass (which, if you know your physics, is actually [...]
Don’t Ask for a Divorce in Victorian England
In 1858, one of the most brilliant surgeons of his day opened a clinic. Isaac Baker Brown named it, officially, “The London Surgical Home for the Reception of Gentlewomen and Females of Respectability suffering from Curable Surgical Diseases.” [Females of Non-Respectability need not apply.] Brown made his reputation doing ovariotomies for cysts, an operation that [...]
