The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany - Softcover

Duden, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674954041 ISBN 13: 9780674954045

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1998

Synopsis

In this study the author asserts that the most basic biological and medical terms we use to describe our own bodies - male and female, healthy or sick - are indeed cultural constructions. To illustrate this, Barbara Duden delves into the records of an 18th-century German physician who documented the medical histories of 1800 women of all ages and backgrounds, often in their own words. This record of complaints, symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments reveals an alien understanding of the female body and its functions.

About this title

Review:

Duden splendidly succeeds in recreating this submerged and secret world of female consciousness, and the ambiguous role of the physician in maintaining it. An important milestone.--Roy Porter "Wellcome Institute, London "

While modern readers may be initially alienated by the way in which phenomena cited in Duden's profuse quotations from [Dr. Johannes Pelargiusi] Storch's journals conflict with contemporary 'certainties' about the body...her approach ultimately makes the desired point: the culturally contingent 'boundary that separates the body, and especially the body beneath the skin, from the world around it' likewise conditions contemporary understandings, not only of what is known about our bodies but also about how people in other times and places have 'imagined' their bodies.--Patricia Herminghouse "Signs "

About the Author:

Barbara Duden has been on the faculty of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Pennsylvania State University and is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Essen, Germany.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0674954041
• ISBN 13: 9780674954045
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 254