Teresa Ortiz Gómez, Medicina, historia y género: 130 años de investigación feminista, Colección Alternativas, 23, Oviedo, KRK Ediciones, 2006, pp. 362, €23.95 (paperback 978-84-96476-52-3).

Abstract

As the title, ‘Medicine, History, and Gender: 130 years of Feminist Research’, suggests, this book presents a wide-ranging overview of the history of medicine written from a feminist perspective since the late nineteenth century. Opening the book with quotations by the medical historian Henry Sigerist and the feminist historian Gerda Lerner, Teresa Ortiz Gomez, a well-known feminist historian of medicine herself who has contributed extensively to the development of the sub-discipline in Spain, presents an in-depth reflection on the confluence of the history of medicine and feminist history. While there is some discussion of nineteenth-century writings, most of the book focuses on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, and thus constitutes a welcome addition to the growing number of studies that reflect on the developments, conceptual frameworks, and debates in women’s and gender history, in this case with a particular focus on the history of medicine. Structured in three parts, the first part provides an introductory overview of the institutional context in which women’s history is undertaken in Spain and the theoretical concepts that have informed feminist studies in the last three decades, giving special attention to the introduction of gender as a category of analysis, feminist debates on the body, and “feminine authority”, a concept employed in Italian and French feminist theory. The second part explores historiographical issues in the history of women, gender, and medicine in chronological order from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. The last part reflects on the role of the history of medicine in higher education in Spain, including a chapter that has a revealing discussion about the percentage of female professors in this discipline in comparison to others, and a break-down of the percentages of publications in the field by women. A chapter which calls for the greater use of visual and oral sources in the history of medicine is followed by a final chapter discussing how the history of medicine is taught in Spain, reflecting on the importance of teaching it in ways that are not androcentric. Ortiz Gomez’s knowledge of feminist historiography, which she discusses in the first and second part of her book, is vast and illuminating. She integrates her analysis of this historiography in Spain with wide knowledge of the trends in feminist writing in Anglo-American, and to an extent, Italian and French historiography. The book thus provides a very interesting new dimension to readers more familiar with the Anglo-American context of debate. However, for those readers it might have been interesting to see a greater exploration of any differences in trends. Did, for instance, the introduction of gender as a category of analysis generate similarly heated controversies amongst feminist historians as it did in the US and Britain, and for comparable reasons? What about the linguistic turn? Furthermore, does the fact that in Spain, unlike in the UK or the US, most historians of medicine, like the author herself, are first trained in medicine and then specialize in medical history have any impact on the themes and theoretical approaches favoured by medical historians? Ortiz Gomez does not give answers to these questions, but her book is none the less a fascinating and highly instructive read for anyone who wants to find out more about the confluence of women’s, gender, and medical history in Spain.