ABSTRACT
It has been argued, most notably by Thomas Laqueur, that a two-sex model of the body emphasizing sexual differences came to dominate western medical theory beginning in the late eighteenth century. Prior to this, medicine generally adhered to the Galenic one-sex model, whereby the bodies of men and women were conceptualised in essentially the same manner. This emphasized a male-centric, hierarchical paradigm in which the female body was regarded as an analogous, inverted version of the male body in both anatomy and physiology. Rather than representing alternative concepts of bodies based on biological differences, the notion of sex was a matter of illustrative degrees of perfection, not ontological division.1 Much of the historiography has focused on the printed medical literature, including anatomical writings and drawings on genitalia and reproductive organs, which at least on the surface appears to have highlighted the similarities (accentuated within Galenic texts), rather than differences (emphasized within the Hippocratic corpus), between men and women.2 As a consequence, there has been
1 Maclean, Renaissance Notion, pp. 30-31; Angus McLaren, ‘The Pleasures of Procreation: Traditional and Bio-Medical Theories of Conception’, in Bynum and Porter (eds), William Hunter, 323-41; McLaren, Reproductive Rituals; Thomas Laqueur, ‘Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology’, in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds), The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1987), 1-41; Laqueur, Making Sex, especially pp. 4-5, 25-9, 34-5, 60-62, 149-51, 155, 157; Laqueur, ‘Sex in the Flesh’, Isis, 94 (2003): 300-306.
