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

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

In this provocative study, Barbara Duden asserts that the most basic biological and medical terms that we use to describe our own bodies--male and female, healthy or sick--are indeed cultural constructions. To illustrate this, Duden delves into the records of an eighteenth-century German physician who meticulously documented the medical histories of eighteen hundred women of all ages and backgrounds, often in their own words.

Patricia Herminghouse - Signs

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.

Duden asserts that the most basic biological and medical terms that we use to describe our own bodies—male and female, healthy or sick—are cultural constructions. To illustrate this, she delves into records of an 18th-century German physician who documented the medical histories of 1,800 women of all ages and backgrounds, often in their own words. Using the medical histories of a cross-section of 18th-century female patients, the author reveals an alien understanding of the female body and its function, and shows that its structure, function and meaning belong to history as well as to nature.