All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

by Elizabeth Comen

The study of anatomy seems to have been permeated early on with a double standard: the depiction of men’s bones conveyed medical knowledge about the human body, while the depiction of women’s bones conveyed aesthetic, cultural, and social concerns. In these early texts, the adult female skeleton is often rendered as if it were a child’s: underdeveloped, frail, breakable. It’s worth noting that this view of women’s bones was not the exclusive purview of men: when the French scientist Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Darlus Thiroux d’Arconville published her drawings of the female skeleton in 1759, she exaggerated the sexed differences to the point of caricature. The skull was vastly smaller, the pelvis much wider. Embedded in the depiction was a message: women, with their smaller skulls and larger hips, were clearly intended by nature itself to be mothers, not thinkers. It was a message that thoroughly permeated the medical thinking of the time. The French medical encyclopédie of 1765, rather than omitting the female skeleton, dwells heavily on the differences between the bones of men and women before drawing this final conclusion: “All of these factors prove that the destiny of women is to have children and to nourish them.” In 1796, German anatomist Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring famously—and inaccurately—illustrated the female skeleton with a disproportionately tiny head, an enormously broad pelvis, and an improbably narrow rib cage. The inaccuracies were so marked that some doct...