Patricia A. Baker, Han Nijdam and Karine van ‘t Land (eds),Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Abstract

Historians, trained to think with time, sometimes need encouragement to do so with space. The history of medicine has absorbed, sometimes belatedly, every other ‘turn’ on offer, so a spatial turn was overdue, and this scholarly and wide-ranging collection will help it on its way. Part One, ‘Spaces of Anatomy’, is splendidly begun by Michael McVaugh. He deftly traces the hesitant and prolonged transition from a two- to a three-dimensional understanding of the body's interior—from an approach in which the function of individual organs is more important than their spatial relationship to one another, to a conception of the totality of the body's contents and the relative coordinates of each part. Rather than looking to Leonardo or Vesalius as the obvious endpoints of such a transformation, McVaugh discusses one path to three-dimensionality in the treatment of anal fistula. Helen King takes us from the anus round to the penis, and to the gendering of body space. She anticipates her monograph-length assault on Laqueur's inadequate one-sex model (2013) by focusing on the prefatory section on male reproduction in the first vernacular midwifery handbook written by a British woman, Jane Sharp (1671).1 In a subtle re-reading of Sharp and her sources, King arrives at a much diminished, or at least much more variegated, view of the penis as the organ of generation in the seventeenth century.