The Myth of the “One-Sex” Body

Abstract

In Making Sex (1990), Thomas Laqueur argued for a dramatic shift in Western medical understandings of sex difference circa 1800, falsely claiming that before then women were generally understood as imperfect men, their genitals trapped inside their bodies by their lack of complexional heat. In fact, the period before 1800 saw the coexistence of competing traditions relating to genital anatomy and function, in which Arabic medical compendia, largely ignored by Laqueur, played an important role. European interest in the inside/out model of the genitals was initially specific to the late medieval Latin surgical tradition. Later elaborated by several sixteenth-century medical writers, including the surgeons Jacopo Berengario of Carpi and Ambroise Paré, it was moribund in learned European medicine by 1600, though it continued to flourish for several decades in vernacular literature, medical and nonmedical, in large part because it invited an explicit discussion of sexual practices.