Women, Gender and Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and France ed. by Kathleen Hardesty Doig, Felicia Berger Sturzer (review)

This collection of ten essays addresses a variety of themes surrounding women and medicine in the eighteenth century. After an introduction that briefly summarizes some central issues, the book is divided into three sections: “Natural History of Women,” “Women as Medical Agents,” and “Gendering of Disease.” The contributions are of unequal quality, some of them revisiting well-known texts, others presenting new material and insights.

Part 1 opens with a survey by Sean Quinlan of works by three well-known authors (P. J. G. Cabanis, J. L. Moreau de la Sarthe, J. J. Virey) and two lesser known (J. F. de Saint-Lambert, Gabriel Jouard). Quinlan provides brief biographies of the authors, whom he characterizes, aside from Cabanis, as “average or even mediocre thinkers” (p. 19). He summarizes common themes—the radical “sexual difference” separating women from men, women’s biologically determined destiny for marriage and reproduction, the deeply pathological condition of women caused by the decadent style of life of the Old Regime. Quinlan urges that these authors sought to influence public thinking about gender roles, to entertain readers with anecdotes and prurient detail, and, most important, to address issues of “self and identity” (p. 17) in a society all at sea after the French Revolution. Surprisingly, he concludes that this often blatantly misogynistic literature helped contemporaries (women?) envision “progressive change” (p. 39). Mary McAlpin’s essay zeroes in on the discourse of degeneration. She culls quotations from such medical authors as Joseph Raulin and D. T. Bienville but also gives considerable space to Antoine Thomas’s famous essay of 1772. Kathleen Doig completes this section by examining articles contributed by Nicolas Chambon de Montaux to the Encyclopédie méthodique, which included thirteen volumes on medicine completed under the guidance of six different editors. Doig discusses Chambon’s entries on the physical constitution of women, women’s illnesses, and pregnancy and childbirth, noting his competing theoretical constructs (localism, humoralism, vitalism). She offers the rather anodyne conclusion that Chambon was an eager contributor to a new age of medicine that, while retaining outworn humoralist ideas, sought chiefly to promote close clinical observation.

In Part 2, “Women as Medical Agents,” Morag Martin offers the results of archival research on a female healer, Augustine Debaralle, who attended the midwifery training program opened at the Paris Maternité in 1802. Having failed her examination, Debaralle returned to her native region of the Nord, where she published at least one medical tract, advertised patent remedies of her creation, and demanded recognition from medical and civil authorities. Instead of getting that, she was imprisoned for highly public criticisms of the government. A less miserable but still unfortunate fate met the labors of Marie Marguerite Biheron, one of three women whose careers are traced in Valérie Lastinger’s essay on medical and scientific work pursued in “The Laboratory, the Boudoir and the Kitchen.” Although admired by Diderot, Grimm, and Franklin for her anatomical wax models, Biheron was also ridiculed as a homely old maid. Lastinger shows how women, finding themselves progressively excluded from public spaces of science (the Jardin du Roi, the Académie des Sciences) where they had once enjoyed at least some welcome, retreated to domestic spaces (kitchens, dairies, stables) that they transformed into workplaces of medicine and science. The last essay in this section, Patsy Fowler’s look at representations of the midwife in eighteenth-century novels (especially Tristram Shandy and Moll Flanders), argues that such works made available to women readers information about the birthing process, birth control, and abortifacients (p. 160).

The essays grouped under the rubric “Gendering of Disease” include a new examination, by Felicia B. Sturzer, of the letters of Julie de Lespinasse, with emphasis on her blended medical and erotic observations. Elizabeth Kuipers looks at women’s reactions across the long eighteenth century to the...