Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (review)

This beautifully produced book is the result of a courageous interdisciplinary project that discusses the early history of a practice that came to be the landmark of academic medicine, acknowledging the crucial place of the female body in it. Focusing on Italy, it encompasses the history of human dissection from the late thirteenth century through the mid-sixteenth century, ending with the advent of the Vesalian program. Bringing into play a wide range of sources, it travels from private arenas—the nunnery and the patrician household—well into the heart of the public anatomical theater. Fundamental to this journey is the historiographical concern of looking at dissection not exclusively as the medical device it eventually became but as a practice that could—and did—serve a diversity of people and purposes. This perspective allows Park to write an innovative and convincing history of "the opening of the human body," as she conscientiously describes her topic (p. 18). In a useful introduction, she sets out her interpretative stance with clarity, arguing that late medieval bodies were not understood primarily in medical terms but in terms of family and kinship as well as religion. Practices such as embalming, autopsy, and Caesarean section were promoted, envisioned, and even performed by laypeople with different agendas in mind, and they influenced academic dissection as it was being gradually established within the medical world. The author explains the growth of an internal, visual, and anatomical conception of the body as the result of a complex interplay of social, cultural, and epistemological phenomena that turned the uterus into the exemplary object of dissection.

The book is framed as a poliedric narrative, with arguments that run in parallel in order to flow together to explain the new renaissance anatomy. In chapter 1, Park explores the net of forces that were behind what she calls holy anatomies: female bodies cut open after death with the aim of honoring and authenticating their saintly qualities. The authority accorded to female bodies and corpses—an expression of the rich autonomous women's religious movement—soon met with ecclesiastical discomfort and suspicion. The specific supernatural attributes of holy women were in need of visible corporeal proof, and their sanction was eventually reassigned to medical expertise. The next chapter delves further into this culturally growing tension. It deals with the coexistence of two ways of obtaining, owning, and communicating knowledge about the internal workings of the body and the treatment of disease. On one hand, the institutional model was sustained by male medical experts on the basis of causal analysis; on the other, empirical knowledge was shared orally among women. While the epistemological gap between the two increased hierarchically, women's private knowledge—women's secrets—was associated gradually with the hidden interior of the female body. As a result, medicine and natural philosophy conceived as secret both the nature of women and their reproductive organs. In chapter 3, Park focuses on how the maternal body came to be a privileged subject of inquiry, dissection, and care—a place of confluence of male dynastic interests, women's reproductive needs, mothers' wishes for their daughters, and learned discourses on generation. By the sixteenth century, as chapter 4 shows, the authority of medical experts—physicians and surgeons—over the treatment and intellectual propriety of women's bodies was well established. Compared with earlier practices of dissection that aimed to collaborate with the capacity of the body to reveal itself, medical anatomy arose as a method of study that produced bodily evidence, a gendered epistemological concept since women's bodies were portrayed as imperfectly known and unable to know, whereas men's bodies were seen as authoritative and capable of self-knowledge. In chapter 5, Park explores how this change affected the status of both, dissectors and those dissected. Female bodies that had been at the heart of the early history...