Female Troubles and Troubled Men in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

Book Reviews Female Troubles and Troubled Men in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France Lindsay Wilson. Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over Maladies des Femmes. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 246 pp. ISBN 0-8018-4438-x; $38.50 (d). Rachel G. Fuchs. Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. 405 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8135-1779-6 (cl); 0-8135-1780-x (pb); $45.00 (cl); $18.00 (pb). Barbara Conrado Pope In the 1960s and '70s Michel Foucault and Jacques Donzelot wrote powerful accounts of how helping professionals in France defined, pohced, and disciplined the poor, the sick, and the deviant.1 They reversed the old story, in which medicine, social work, and psychiatry evolved to the greater good of aU, and showed instead how the main benefactors of this alleged progress were the helpers themselves who gained the power to set the rules and inscribe specific fields of action, be they hospitals, asylums, prisons, or poor neighborhoods and local social agencies. Lindsay Wilson's Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment and Rachel Fuchs's Poor and Pregnant in Paris revisit the same geographical and analytical territory. But their accounts are much more complex, in part because they excel where Donzelot and Foucault were at their weakest, in their analysis of gender and the roles that women played both as agents and subjects of the helping professions. Maladies des femmes are the diseases connected to women's reproductive cycles and sexual organs. Wilson's book focuses on three major controversies surrounding these maladies in the eighteenth century. Throughout the book, Wilson is careful to integrate the work of female commentators, demonstrating how important women—as salonieres, journalists, and pamphleteers—were to the formation of what she calls "public opinion." But the book's real subject is not women or female agency. It is the medical profession and the Enlightenment, which Wilson avers were more complex than some Foucaultian or feminist scholars might think. The first controversy concerned the pubhc clamor caused by the claims of miraculous healings at the St. Médard cemetery in Paris, where © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 6 No. 3 (Fall) 1994 BOOK REVIEW: BARBARA CORRADO POPE 127 a certain Jansenist deacon, François de Paris, came to rest in 1727. Those who visited his grave were largely lower class and held radical communitarian and egalitarian beliefs. Since the healings were accompanied by cries, moans, and quaking, their beneficiaries became known as the Convulsionarles . One of the threads that Wilson weaves through her narrative is the theme of secularization. It is notable that the government called in doctors, not priests, to investigate. But it is not at all surprising that these learned men were motivated as much by the desire to queU pubhc disorder as by the search for physical proofs. Indeed, Philippe Hecquet, a doctor who wrote five books on the subject, did not even feel it necessary to examine any of the miraculés. He had God and science on his side. Later, although order and morality continued to inform medical opinion, rehgious orthodoxy would not. Because women were so prominent among the Convulsionarles, Hecquet and others had httle trouble proving that the so-called miracles were only a "natural" result of the female tendency to hysteria. Yet the doctors condemned women, despite their aUeged physical frailties, for willfully surrendering themselves to erotic and disorderly impulses. Thus the controversy became the vehicle by which the traditional link between women, disorder, and reUgious fanaticism was reinforced and brought into the enlightened age. The core of Wilson's book is devoted to an analysis of a series of court decisions on 'late births." On the face of it, this is the least dramatic of the three controversies: the cases were sprinkled throughout the century, and they affected only the individual families involved in the suits. Yet it is this controversy that is most central to Wilson's thesis that there was no single tendency that defined Enlightenment medicine. Governments and ruling class men would have liked a once-and-forall definition of "late...