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Darrera modificació: 2018-01-25
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Green, Monica H., "Bodies, gender, health, disease: recent work on medieval women's medicine", Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 2 (2005), 1-46.
- Resum
- This long essay review summarizes work in the field of History of Medicine as it relates to topics on women and gender in the medieval world—mostly focusing on western Europe but bringing in some comparative work. It supplements and expands upon two earlier reviews of the field that I did in 1989 and 1993. Topics include: (1) a review of edited texts (where I argue that “we have perhaps reached the point of critical mass, where enough work has been done to identify both the major continuities and the major novelties in the textual traditions of women's medicine”); (2) “technologies of the body,” a term I have coined to refer to “a group of techniques, beliefs, and practices focused on intervening in the functioning of the body (including, but not limited to, the alleviation of pain)” and which I propose as a definition wider than “medicine” to capture the focus on cosmetics, promotion of fertility (rather than contraceptives), and even andrology in many medieval texts on women's medicine; (3)sex differences as they were understood in medieval medical literature, which challenge Laqueur's idea of a “one-sex body,” including beliefs in male menstruation, the emphasis on “provoking the menses” in texts on women's medicine, and the impact of the “new Aristotle” starting in the 13th century, especially new interest in the nature of generation; (4) women as medical agents, a concept I develop here to circumvent the limiting vocabulary of medical professionalization and encompass women's various engagements with healthcare, including as readers of medical texts and recipes, the lack of evidence for professionalized midwives bebofe the 14th cent.; (5) childbirth as a female space, where I contest the assumption that childbirth was exclusively a female concern and show instead that there are a varieties of ways pregnancy, childbirth, and wetnursing can be analyzed as gendered phenomena; and (6) future directions, where I explore topics and methodologies that might yet proved valuable. The essay draws on medical anthropology both for conceptual analyses of the workings of gender, but also (via ethnographies) as a source of comparative material.
- Matèries
- Història de la medicina
Dones
Medicina - Ginecologia, obstetrícia i cosmètica
- URL
- https://www.academia.edu/19979497/Monica_H._Green_B ...
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