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.
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