Making Women's Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology

by Monica H. Green

Making Women's Medicine Masculine challenges the common belief that prior to the eighteenth century men were never involved in any aspect of women's healthcare in Europe. Using sources ranging from the writings of the famous twelfth-century female practitioner, Trota of Salerno, all the way to the great tomes of Renaissance male physicians, and covering both medicine and surgery, this study demonstrates that men slowly established more and more authority in diagnosing and prescribing treatments for women's gynecological conditions (especially infertility) and even certain obstetrical conditions.

Even if their "hands-on" knowledge of women's bodies was limited by contemporary mores, men were able to establish their increasing authority in this and all branches of medicine due to their greater access to literacy and the knowledge contained in books, whether in Latin or the vernacular. As Monica Green shows, while works written in French, Dutch, English, and Italian were sometimes addressed to women, nevertheless even these were often re-appropriated by men, both by practitioners who treated women nd by laymen interested to learn about the "secrets" of generation.

While early in the period women were considered to have authoritative knowledge on women's conditions (hence the widespread influence of the alleged authoress "Trotula"), by the end of the period to be a woman was no longer an automatic qualification for either understanding or treating the conditions that most commonly afflicted the female sex--with implications of women's exclusion from production of knowledge on their own bodies extending to the present day.

Genres: History, Feminism, Health, Nonfiction, Academic, Medicine

432 pages, Hardcover

First published March 20, 2008

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

While dense at times, this is a great book. Green traces the Trotula, a text on women's health, as iterations were revised, rewritten, and spread around 12th - 15th century Europe. In doing so, Green shows that while parts of the text may have originally been authored by a woman, literate medical men transformed the text into a information on women's bodies written by and for professional medical men (even if they still relied on women to touch and examine women). In excluding women from Latin literacy and medical textual communities they were forced to practice outside of the increasing professional sphere of medicine and when they did practice it was often not backed by Latin theory that informed acceptable male-dominated professions. Nonetheless, this book played a key role in early feminist physicians drawing on the text to prove women's long history in medical practice - which Green touches upon in her conclusion.

[Lauren Ruiz!!! · Rating 3 out of 5]

libro del tfg, la primera mitad si que me ha servido de mucho, pero siento que en muchas ocasiones se queda un un punto un poco superficial de la cuestion...sobre todo los últimos capitulos los he sentido como muy caoticos y reiterando cosas que ya se habían dicho. Tendré que volver a consultarlo, pero bueno le sobran como 115 páginas

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am really in two minds as to how to rate this. On the bright side, it's clear that the scholarship is extraordinary. I checked the bibliography, and Green's referred to nearly 30 of her own publications (a tiny portion of the reference list) so her expertise in the subject is obviously well-established and of some duration. I also learned something, which is always nice. The subject of this book is far outside my field, so discovering twelfth-century women's medicine (and women practitioners) and how their contributions were marginalised over the following centuries might have been genuinely interesting.

Might have been? Should have been. If I were rating this book on scholarship I'd give it five stars. Did I enjoy it? Fuck no. It's unrelentingly turgid and was a slog from beginning to end. There's one major culprit to blame for that: this book has (I counted them) 957 footnotes, many of them explanatory rather than referential. I did not count how many pages were more footnote than text, but I hated every one of them. I might comment on how a book which emphasises how literacy and access to written materials shapes authority tries so very hard to exclude readers, but truthfully there probably aren't many lay readers trudging through this to begin with.

That is not much excuse. I'm very familiar with academic prose, having written a bunch of it myself - albeit in a very different field, and I'm not half the scholar Green appears to be - but I don't recall ever having a more fragmented, disrupted reading experience. It was genuinely difficult to keep track of the main argument because it kept getting interrupted by more fucking footnotes. Those things are supposed to aid clarity, not take it away, but the horrible over-reliance on them made both argument and book a drudgery.

Five stars for scholarship. One for readability. I'm averaging it to three, but I'm sorry to say that the awkward, unwieldy presentation of what should have been an interesting subject probably succeeded in killing off that interest more than it did stoking it.

[fausto · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and scholarly approach to the patriarchaly-constructucted medicine in the middle ages (specially in the late middle ages and the early renaissance). Unlike what you kinda expect from the title, the book is not about how women healers were kicked out by male doctor. Instead, is a history of the production of medical autoritative knowledge and how those books were related with the social construction of gender in the middle ages.
The central theme of the book is the compendium "Trotula", a three-part medical manual on gynecology. How "Trotula" (partly authored by a real medieval woman healer, Trota of Salerno) were recived, translated and influenced the gynecologycal writings of Europe (specially France, Italy, England, Germany and the Netherlands), and how this "female authored" book ended to be displaced by full male-authored books.
Basically, the premise and whole theme of the book is how gynecology has been, in the western world at least, a male dominated and male-constructed field of knowledge. A reflection of a patriarchal society.

I think is an excellent analysis of medieval women's history and culture.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I have some issues with the overall argument, Green makes a very insightful points. Her language skills are very impressive as is her ability to span time & region. I do not question that men were involved in women's medicine as early as the medieval period, but I question the extent to which they were -- especially when women are still handling the majority of birth (at least in England) by the end of the seventeenth century.