Dissecting the Feminine: Women Doctors and Dead Bodies in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

For all the scholarly interest which ‘the body’ has elicited in recent years, the bodies under question have usually been those of living human subjects. The dead body, which (to state the obvious) has no subjectivity, consciousness, agency, or volition, has not been quite so interesting for those involved in the postmodern project of problema-tising the mind/body distinction. But the human corpse is a cultural and historical product like any other version of the human body, even if it is not a ‘subject’ as such. Given the proliferation of discourses which produce ‘death’ in any given culture, the dead body turns out to be a very inscribed body. Part of my objective in this chapter is to examine the discursive construction of the dead body at a particular historical moment and cultural site: the late nineteenth-century dissection room. What I am especially interested in is the idea that dead bodies were still sexed bodies, and that particular discourses of gender and sexuality shaped the encounters between students of medicine -male and female — and what they called their ‘subjects’. Specifically, I focus on the sudden foregrounding of such discourses of gender and sexuality prompted by the entry of women into conventional medical education; women who, if they wanted to register as a doctor, had to dissect the human corpse several times over.