Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (review)

In the 1920s Ernst Laqueur, a physician and pharmacologist working at the University of Amsterdam, isolated “female” sex hormone from the urine of stallions, injecting a startling hint of androgyny into the new and exciting science of endocrinology. This event, recounted by Laqueur’s great-nephew Thomas in his now-classic Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), prompted Oudshoorn to begin this original study of the research practices of Laqueur and his colleagues. While acknowledging her debt to earlier studies of the cultural “embeddedness” of ideas of gender and the body, she has chosen to move beyond historical, literary, and philosophical discourse to “the discourse of materiality-building” (p. 12)—that is, to ground her discussion of the creation of the gendered hormonal body in the material conditions and practices of the scientific work. The result is an original book of richly interwoven analyses.

Oudshoorn traces the history of the sex hormones, from the origins of the idea in the early 1900s, to the collaborations between clinicians and laboratory scientists to isolate and characterize the specific chemical substances in the 1920s, to the alliances of scientists, clinicians, and pharmaceutical companies to find a marketable clinical application for the new compounds in the later 1920s and 1930s. Although she duly notes the work of other scientists in Germany and the United States, her narrative focuses on Laqueur’s research in Amsterdam and his ties to the Netherlands firm Organon, still a leading European marketer of hormonal medications.

At each step Oudshoorn makes clear the interrelationships between cultural assumptions, research and clinical practice, and biological materiality. Each hormone was necessarily identified as “male” or “female,” even as the scientists found that each appeared to have specific functions in the physiologic development of both sexes. The existence of an established specialty in female reproductive medicine, gynecology, ensured a ready supply of specimen materials and enabled the earlier and more extensive examination of the “female” hormones, estrogen and progesterone. Laqueur and Organon could rely on clinics and midwifery schools to keep them supplied with female urine; sufficient quantities of male urine were much harder to obtain. Moreover, the clinicians were eager to experiment with possible therapeutic uses for “female” hormones and provided an active market for their production. The synthesis of testosterone in 1936 stimulated research activity on “male” hormones, but the absence of a clinical specialty in male reproductive medicine limited the development of therapeutic applications.

Organon, which considered itself a “science-based company” (p. 84), marketed female hormones for the treatment of infertility and menstrual irregularity—that is, for the restoration and preservation of normal childbearing; the firm chose not to develop a contraceptive product. In her penultimate chapter, Oudshoorn describes the work of Gregory Pincus and John Rock in reorienting hormones to control fertility and, in the process, redefining the female reproductive body in terms of menstrual cycles. This story will be familiar to many readers, although Oudshoorn offers some original insights. One gathers that she has more to say about oral contraceptives; I look forward to reading her next contribution.