Nahema Hanafi, Le frisson et le baume: Expériences féminines du corps au Siècle des lumières

Abstract

Nahema Hanafi’s study of women and corporeality in the French Enlightenment focuses on first-person accounts of the sick female body in relation to the increasing power of medical professionals to dictate diagnoses and treatments over the course of the eighteenth century. While she analyses private journals and letters, Hanafi is far more interested in the genre of epistolary consultations, and most notably in exchanges by both men and women with the famous Swiss doctor and medical theorist, Samuel-Auguste Tissot. The organising principle of this study is Thomas Laqueur’s ‘two-sex’ model: that during the eighteenth century, men and women’s bodies came to be seen as radically different, with the biological inferiority of women used as a justification for their continued social subordination to men. However, in Part 1, Hanafi argues that the noble and wealthy bourgeois patients treated by doctors such as Tissot did not in fact adhere to one of the principal conclusions attached to this model: that the French urban elite was becoming increasingly weak and effeminate. She reports that male patients were as likely as women to complain of the vapors and to emphasize their high degree of ‘sensibility’, but saw themselves as no less virile for possessing these characteristics. The treatises in which the effeminacy argument was promoted demonstrate to Hanafi above all the class divide between the doctors and their patients.