Medizin und Geschlecht: Zur Konstruktion der Kategorie Geschlecht im medizinischen Diskurs des 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Katrin Schmersahl. Medizin und Geschlecht: Zur Konstruktion der Kategorie Geschlecht im medizinischen Diskurs des 19. Jahrhunderts. Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, no. 36. Leverkusen, Germany: Leske-Budrich, 1998. 383 pp. DM 68.00 (paperbound).

Medicine made great progress toward developing a scientific base in the nineteenth century, but in the process it carried much of the cultural baggage of older, nonscientific attitudes with it. Perhaps nowhere were these traditional attitudes incorporated more into the medical mainstream than in what we would now call gender issues, the translation I use for the German word Geschlecht. Existing assumptions of what constituted "masculinity" and "femininity"--what scholars today would label as the product of social constructionism--were established as norms in medicine, and those who did not conform were labeled deviants. Much of the last part of the twentieth century has been spent in reevaluating many of these assumptions, and constructing new ones. Since biological factors remain constant, although our knowledge of them does not, at the present time most scholars in the field hold that the development of gender attitudes is an interaction between biological forces and societal and cultural ones. The current debate concerns not nature vs. nurture or social construction vs. biology, but rather how these two forces interact with each other.

Katrin Schmersahl examines how these gender assumptions entered medicine through a detailed and analytical review of the medical literature of the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. Medicine, she states, being dominated by men, was antifeminist in its thinking, and often regarded itself a moral arbiter of correct behavior. She examines the development of the bipolar model. Most of the writers who influenced medical thinking on this issue at the time were German or German-speaking, ranging alphabetically from Alfred Adler to Alexander Zweig, but she includes references to Americans such as George Beard, and Englishmen such as Havelock Ellis and Charles Darwin. Her discussion centers on some more than others, but it seems fairly inclusive. She is not attacking medicine or the physicians but, in the best tradition of medical history, showing how assumptions influenced interpretation, and how departures from what was regarded as the norm became stigmatized as deviant. A significant part of her book is devoted to the subject of hysteria and its implications for the medicalization of many aspects of "femininity."

Based on a 1996 dissertation at the University of Hamburg, the book is well documented, with three or four footnotes on every page. There is an excellent bibliography that cites English, French, German, and other sources, but is mainly based on German writers. Schmersahl also includes a separate bibliography of general literature on gender issues with citations to Newsweek, Der Spiegel, and many of the current writers on gender issues. Each chapter ends with a two-page summary of the contents of the chapter (a Fazit), which should prove helpful to those whose German is not what it should be. The one major defect is the lack of an index.

Vern L. Bullough
University of Southern California

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