Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate Over "Maladies des Femmes." (review)

In this book, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over “Maladies des Femmes,” Lindsay Wilson examines three debates that tested medicine’s authority and in the process raised larger cultural concerns. The three famous causes célèbres that she studies fall into three distinct periods of the Enlightenment: they include the havoc created by the Jansenist convulsionaries of St. Médard in the 1730s, the debates over the possibility of late births in the 1760s, and the controversies over the Mesmerist cures in the 1780s.

In each case, the expertise of physicians and surgeons was called upon to judge the authenticity and veracity of the claims; and in each case, the lack of consensus among medical authorities opened the way for other individuals and groups such as lawyers, priests, philosophes, and a few women to air their opinions. That a lively response to these medical and legal scandals surfaced in books, newspapers, and journals reflected the “shift in the center of politics from the institutions of court and parlement to the journals, theaters, and streets” as portrayed by such scholars as Keith Baker, Sara Maza, and Dena Goodman (p. 6).

Since Wilson focuses on maladies des femmes, it is not surprising to find that the debates were carried out in gender-specific terms. Discussions about the largely female convulsionaries, adherents to Mesmerism, and the eleven-month pregnancy cases heightened concerns about family stability and about the dangers of women’s influence in the public sphere. In addition, Wilson shows how a distrust and fear of women’s irrational and disorderly behavior reinforced the “fear of the ignorance and presumption of the lower social orders,” in the case of the convulsionaries, and the “censure of a degenerate elite,” in the case of the controversy over Mesmer (p. 130).

Wilson hopes to contribute to the literature on medicine, science, and gender by showing that the sexual stereotyping uncovered by such scholars as Sander Gilman, Claudine Herzlich, and Janine Pierret in nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses on tuberculosis and madness had their roots in the eighteenth-century debates about maladies des femmes. In fact, she traces the origins of this discourse about women and irrationality further back in time, arguing that the enduring nature of these stereotypes makes it “unlikely that attempts to solve medical problems through cultural critiques based on stereotypes of gender or class will ever be entirely abandoned” (p. 159). She even claims, in an overworked generalization, that each epoch has used stereotypes about women to explain female illness or the aberrant behavior and diseases associated with various social groups.

Medical historians will find the sections of the book that deal with the evolution of medical jurisprudence to be the most useful. Drawing the outline of her analysis from the synthetic article by Jean Lecuir, Wilson shows how the lack of consensus on late births within the medical community caused a crise de conscience among jurists, priests, and philosophes. The editors of the Encyclopedia of 1781 “deplored the gullibility of most surgeons in matters of medical jurisprudence” (p. 74). And where provincial surgeons proved more enlightened than the villagers, “public pressure to endorse wild speculation could sometimes seem insurmountable” (p. 75). By publicizing these problems, philosophes and enlightened physicians and surgeons helped to improve the quality of medical reports demanded by the courts. Medicine’s failure to resolve the medical and legal issues raised by these controversies, however, underscored the precariousness of the Enlightenment notion of “regular and immutable laws of nature” and undermined public confidence in medical opinion.