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  • The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence by Helen King
  • Frank Swannack
King, Helen, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (History of Medicine in Context), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 286; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9781409463

Helen King challenges Thomas Laqueur’s thesis that in classical and early modern medical thinking there was only a single ‘one-sex’ body, whereas a ‘two-sex’ body was not introduced until the eighteenth century. King highlights how Laqueur’s selective use of Hippocratic gynaecology means that his ‘one-sex’ and ‘two-sex’ body ‘reduces complexity to simplicity’ (p. xi). However, King is not simply interested in exposing the inconsistencies of Laqueur’s findings from his influential 1990 book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Through close reading of classical and early modern medical treatises, she writes the study that maybe Laqueur should have produced.

In the Preface, King describes her general dissatisfaction with Laqueur’s ‘simple two-stage model’. Despite finding inaccuracies in Laqueur’s simplified model, King notes its continuing influence in history and literature. Therefore, the need to thoroughly critique Laqueur’s ‘one-sex’ and ‘two-sex’ body is long overdue. A wider assessment of Laqueur and the popularity of the Making Sex book start the Introduction. King highlights how Laqueur’s habit of selective quotation from Aristotle’s Masterpiece to strengthen his argument results in a misleading view of classical medicine.

Chapter 1 focuses on Laqueur’s ‘one-sex’ body ‘with its notion that men are women with their “insides out” – and vice versa’ (p. 31). King argues that the model attributes a ‘misleading uniformity’ to premodern Europe (p. 31). The chapter then delves into a reassessment of Laqueur’s narrow use of Galen, Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In Chapter 2, King investigates what Laqueur claims to be a pictorial representation of the ‘one-sex’ body in Figure 27 of Vesalius’s Fabrica (1543). She discusses the importance of the caption and labels of Figure 27 that, crucially, Laqueur omitted. King also examines Vesalius’s womb and vagina in its sixteenth-century context. Like his contemporaries, King notes, Vesalius combines one-sex and two-sex anatomy.

Chapter 3 concentrates on different Victorian readings of Phaethousa – a woman who stopped menstruating and grew a beard. In particular, the Victorian fascination with bearded ladies is discussed. This leads King to consider Phaethousa as a hermaphrodite, and to a discussion on the difficulty of classifying hermaphrodites.

The early modern understanding of Phaethousa as a sex-change story is analysed in Chapter 4. Her eventual death, linked to her unusual condition as proof that a woman cannot become a man, upholds a ‘two-sex’ model. Yet King also highlights how Phaethousa’s death is omitted from some early [End Page 186] modern accounts to argue how sex change is possible so that her story conforms to a ‘one-sex’ body. She then examines in more detail early modern readings where Phaethousa is the dutiful wife who misses her absent husband to the point where she becomes him. The various accounts of Phaethousa lead King to conclude that her story reveals the complexity of the early modern engagement with female anatomy and gender identity.

Chapter 5 begins King’s analysis of Agnodice, the story of a woman who disguises herself as a man to learn medicine then reveals herself as a woman in court by exposing her body. Agnodice’s story is also linked to hagiography, further demonstrating how it cannot be attributed to any one genre. In Chapter 6, King discusses whether Agnodice could be considered a midwife or a physician. She also investigates how women were already organised as midwives long before male physicians claimed the role.

King then analyses, in Chapter 7, different versions of Agnodice’s story through how it is sometimes used to accentuate medicine or midwifery. This is followed by a discussion on the diagnosis of Agnodice’s first patient, and how effectively a man could treat a woman patient. Chapter 8 serves as a conclusion discussing how sexual identity is applicable to all parts of...

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