| Contents |
Introduction / Felicia Berger Sturzer -- Part I: The Natural History of Women. Writing the Natural History of Women: Medicine, Social Thought, and Genre in Post-Revolutionary France / Sean Quinlan -- Health and the Eighteenth-Century French Woman: A History of Decline / Mary McAlpin -- Towards the New Medicine: Nicolas Chambon de Montaux's Contributions to the Encyclopédie méthodique / Kathleen Hardesty Doig -- Part II: Women as Medical Agents. 'Augustine Debaralle, insensée, folle, charlatane, et enfin tout ce qu'il vous plaira': A Female Healer's Struggle for Medical Recognition in Napoleonic France / Morag Martin -- The Laboratory, the Boudoir and the Kitchen: Medicine, Home and Domesticity / Valérie Lastinger -- From Mother Midnight to Dr. Slop: Understanding Reproduction in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture / Patsy Fowler -- Part III. Gendering of Disease. Love and Disease: The Contaminated Letters of Julie de Lespinasse / Felicia B. Sturzer -- Silence Reconsidered: British Literary Women and Breast Cancer / Elizabeth Kuipers -- Medical Imagery of Venereal Disease and the Gendering of Culpability in Eighteenth-Century France / Marialana Wittman -- You've Got the Vapors?: Historical, Medical and Literary Perspectives / Ivy Dyckman -- Contributors. |
| Abstract |
"Based on encyclopedias, medical journals, historical, and literary sources, this collection of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the intersection of women, gender, and disease in England and France. Diverse critical perspectives highlight contributions women made to the scientific and medical communities of the eighteenth century. In spite of obstacles encountered in spaces dominated by men, women became midwives, and wrote self-help manuals on women's health, hygiene, and domestic economy. Excluded from universities, they nevertheless contributed significantly to such fields as anatomy, botany, medicine, and public health. Enlightenment perspectives on the nature of the female body, childbirth, diseases specific to women, "gender," sex, "masculinity" and "femininity," adolescence, and sexual differentiation inform close readings of English and French literary texts. Treatises by Montpellier vitalists influenced intellectuals and physicians such as Nicolas Chambon, Pierre Cabanis, Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, Jules-Joseph Virey, and Theophile de Bordeu. They impacted the exchange of letters and production of literary works by Julie de Lespinasse, Francoise de Graffigny, Nicolas Chamfort, Mary Astell, Frances Burney, Lawrence Sterne, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. In our post-modern era, these essays raise important questions regarding women as subjects, objects, and readers of the philosophical, medical, and historical discourses that framed the project of enlightenment."--Back cover |
