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Books > Medicine > Clinical & internal medicine > Gynaecology & obstetrics
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Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology - The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Hardcover, New Ed)
Loot Price: R4,721
Discovery Miles 47 210
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Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology - The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Hardcover, New Ed)
Series: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The Gynaeciorum libri, the 'Books on [the diseases of] women,' a
compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on gynaecology, is the
inspiration for this intensive exploration of the origins of a
subfield of medicine. This collection was first published in 1566,
with a second edition in 1586/8 and a third, running to 1097 folio
pages, in 1597. While examining the origins of the compendium,
Helen King here concentrates on its reception, looking at a range
of different uses of the book in the history of medicine from the
sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Looking at the competition and
collaboration among different groups of men involved in childbirth,
and between men and women, she demonstrates that arguments about
history were as important as arguments about the merits of
different designs of forceps. She focuses on the eighteenth
century, when the 'man-midwife' William Smellie found his
competence to practise challenged on the grounds of his allegedly
inadequate grasp of the history of medicine. In his lectures,
Smellie remade the 'father of medicine', Hippocrates, as the
'father of midwifery'. The close study of these texts results in a
fresh perspective on Thomas Laqueur's model of the defeat of the
one-sex body in the eighteenth century, and on the origins of
gynaecology more generally. King argues that there were three
occasions in the history of western medicine on which it was
claimed that women's difference from men was so extensive that they
required a separate branch of medicine: the fifth century BC, and
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. By looking at all three
occasions together, and by tracing the links not only between
ancient Greek ideas and their Renaissance rediscovery, but also
between the Renaissance compendium and its later owners, King
analyzes how the claim of female 'difference' was shaped by
specific social and cultural conditions. Midwifery, Obstetrics and
the Rise of Gynaecology makes a genuine contribution not only to
the history of medicine and its subfield of gynaecology, but also
to gender and cultural studies.
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