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Secrets Of Women - Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Paperback)
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Secrets Of Women - Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Paperback)
Series: Secrets Of Women
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Women's bodies and the study of anatomy in Italy between the late
thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. Toward the end of the
Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote
increasing attention to what they called "women's secrets," by
which they meant female sexuality and generation. At the same time,
Italian physicians and surgeons began to open human bodies in order
to study their functions and the illnesses that afflicted them,
culminating in the great illustrated anatomical treatise of Andreas
Vesalius in 1543. Katharine Park traces these two closely related
developments through a series of case studies of women whose bodies
were dissected after their deaths: an abbess, a lactating virgin,
several patrician wives and mothers, and an executed criminal.
Drawing on a variety of texts and images, she explores the history
of women's bodies in Italy between the late thirteenth and the
mid-sixteenth centuries in the context of family identity,
religious observance, and women's health care. Secrets Of Women
explodes the myth that medieval religious prohibitions hindered the
practice of human dissection in medieval and Renaissance Italy,
arguing that female bodies, real and imagined, played a central
role in the history of anatomy during that time. The opened corpses
of holy women revealed sacred objects, while the opened corpses of
wives and mothers yielded crucial information about where babies
came from and about the forces that shaped their vulnerable flesh.
In the process, what male writers knew as the "secrets of women"
came to symbolize the most difficult challenges posed by human
bodies-challenges that dissection promised to overcome. Park's
study of women's bodies and men's attempts to know them-and through
these efforts to know their own-demonstrates the centrality of
gender to the development of early modern anatomy.
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