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Medicine, Marriage, and Human Degeneration in the French Enlightenment
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2005
- pp. 263-281
- 10.1353/ecs.2005.0022
- Article
- Additional Information
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This paper examines a representative sampling of medical conjugal hygiene treatises—Charles Augustin Vandermonde's Essai sur la manière de perfectionner l'espèce humaine (1756), Lelarge de Lignac's De l'homme et de la femme considérés physiquement dans l'état de mariage (1772), Jean-André Venel's Essai sur la santé et l'éducation médicinale des filles destinées au mariage (1776), and Louis-Joseph-Marie Robert's Essai sur la mégalanthropogénésie (1801)—in order to demonstrate how the medicalization of the institution of marriage both reflects trends within the natural sciences of the day and embodies a number of ideological concerns related to the health of the individual and that of the polity in the second half of the eighteenth century in France.