First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Based on a wide range of Latin and vernacular sources, this essay reexamines Thomas Laqueur’s and Londa Schiebinger’s influential claim that the idea of incommensurable anatomical difference between the sexes was “invented” in the eighteenth century, reflecting, in particular, a need to resort to nature in order to justify female subordination against new ideals of equality and universal rights. It provides ample evidence that already around 1600 many leading physicians, rather than proclaiming a “one‐sex model” of female inferiority, insisted on (...) the unique and purposeful features of the female skeleton and the female genital organs and illustrated them visually. The author shares Laqueur’s and Schiebinger’s assumption that the shift toward incommensurable anatomical difference helped legitimize woman’s subordinate position as housewife and mother as naturally given. But around 1600 Enlightenment ideals as yet played no role. Instead, this shift reflected, in particular, contemporary physicians’ growing appreciation of personal discovery and innovation, the rise of a specialist gynecology, and new views on marriage and motherhood in the upper classes among whom the physicians lived and whose support they sought. (shrink)

Michael Stolberg claims there was a broad movement in the sixteenth century toward sexing skeletons and offers Felix Platter’s singular 1583 female skeleton and Caspar Bauhin’s 1597 reproduction of that skeleton as evidence. He admits that these illustrations did not become a standard feature of anatomical textbooks, though he maintains that the descriptions of these skeletons became “canonical.” Stolberg does not appreciate the extent to which Platter’s female skeleton was an anomaly. Distinctively female‐sexed skeletons flooded Europe after about 1730, and, (...) importantly, anatomists at the time perceived that these depictions were radically new. Indeed, widespread and protracted debates erupted over the exact features of the female skeleton. These anatomical illustrations emerged within a novel political climate, where sex in the body was newly seen as grounding gender roles in new social regimes. The story of the European study of sexual differences is not one of slow and steady accretion of positive knowledge, as Stolberg implies. That story is fraught with changing reinterpretations and relocations of difference, and new meanings attached to new kinds of sameness and difference within differing cultural contexts. It is wrong to judge foundational shifts in scientific culture merely by firsts. (shrink)

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Visible Human Project examines how the VHP provides visual access to every organ of the body, viewable from every angle and capable of being manipulated to simulate living processes like respiration.