Customer Reviews

Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine)

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I read the 2003 print of the 1993 book. It features 281 regular text pages including 8 monochrome picture pages and extensive footnotes (thankfully) at the bottoms of the pages. It is Joan Cadden's direct academic response to Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud of 1992. The latter claimed much too monolithic historic one-sex-concepts. Cadden paints a more complex picture which includes differing historical views. It urned her the 1994 Pfizer Award as the Outstanding Book in the History of Science. Of further interest may be Nature's Body: Gender In The Making Of Modern Science and Mismeasure of Women: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex.

Beyond it's correcting character, I like this book for its many details. Such as the described historic concepts of the uterus ("hystera") once thought to be a separate and moving entity, hence causing the term and condition known till today as hysteria. (And watching current movies, I may say, the concept of the hysteric women in various contexts as in contrast to men has survived till today.) As well as related gender thinking, such as women supposedly representing imperfect or defective males. That a woman on top (in bed) was considered an usurpation is no less funny and revealing.

After reading books on the more recent history of medical prohibitions of masturbation (Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror and - also by Thomas Laqueur - Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation) I find it fascinating that before, in stark contrast, it was actually prescribed on doctor's orders for various conditions such as headaches, weight loss and melancholia. Midwives having to provide the service for virgins till the latter ejaculated. And that in the light of the West's female ejaculatory amnesia, only very recently having been rediscovered! (See Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot: Not Your Mother's Orgasm Book! (Positively Sexual))

A very enligthening and enjoyable book with easy vocabulary.