The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence

Abstract

Health & History, 2014. 16/2 153 Book Reviews Helen King. The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). ISBN 9781409463351 (HB). ix + 286pp. Bearded ladies, hermaphroditism, and transgendered women are all subjects addressed in Professor Helen King’s The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. King’s text serves as an explicit challenge to the enduring authority of Thomas Laqueur’s ‘one-sex’ and ‘two-sex’ models, as espoused in his 1990 book Making Sex. Laqueur posited that the prevailing medical view of sexual difference, from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, was the Galenic conception that ‘Women are but Men turn’d Out-side in’ (p.10). Focusing on the classical and early modern periods, King contends that medical thinking on sexual difference was so diverse and complex during these timeframes that to isolate one model as dominant would be an oversimplification. Her work makes clear that Laqueur’s ‘one-sex’ model was but one idea propagated by classical and early modern medical theorists. King also rejects Laqueur’s secondary argument, that women and men were not recognised as fundamentally sexually different until the late seventeenth century. She analyses classical and early modern medical treatises, and explores the retellings of two classical stories of the sexed body, to show that the refutation of the ‘one-sex’ discourse, and the transition to the ‘two-sex’ model, occurred as early as the sixteenth century. TheOne-SexBodyisdividedintothreeparts.Thefirstpartengages in a dialogue with Laqueur’s analysis of classical and early modern medical and scientific works. King’s aim in this section is to show how Laqueur’s ‘selective’ use of a limited sample of evidence led to the misconception that the ‘one-sex’ body was the only expression of sexual difference. She makes a compelling argument. By drawing on a wider scope of evidence than Laqueur and closely reading his key sources, such as Galen and Vesalius, King successfully shows that even the major proponents of the ‘one-sex’ model diverge from this idea. In contrast to Laqueur, King refers not only to the canonical texts of the ‘great men’ of history and science, but supplements her argument with lesser known works, and even incorporates a female perspective, in the form of Jane Sharpe’s 1671 midwifery guide. King provides clear evidence that the pure form of the ‘one-sex’model had 154 BOOK REVIEWS been both explicitly rejected by French physician Andre du Laurens in 1593, and was subject to numerous challenges, including Caspar Bauhin in 1604 and Jane Sharpe in 1671, prior to the late seventeenth century. The second and third parts of this text depart from Laqueur’s method of analysis, instead relying on two classical stories to track changing attitudes, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, towards the sexed body. The two stories consulted are that of Phaethousa and Agnodice. Phaethousa was a woman who had previously borne children but, after her husband left, ceased menstruation, and ‘grew hairy all over, she grew a beard, [and] her voice became harsh’(p.20).Agnodice, conversely, was considered the first female midwife. She was raised when women and slaves were forbidden to practice medicine. To counter this problem, Agnodice dressed as a man and trained under the doctor Herophilus, incurring the jealously of male physicians. She is ultimately put on trial and forced to reveal her true gender. Using these two stories, as opposed to the typical method of comparing medical and scientific treatises, offers a new and original perspective on the pervasive cultural ideas surrounding the sexed body. While this method may be considered dubious, the extensive evidential support King provides, and the interesting manner in which she conveys her ideas, results in an effective piece of academic literature. King’s text is by no means the first critique of Laqueur’s work, but it is the most comprehensive. She succeeds in convincing the reader that the ‘one-sex’ model was not the sole extant theory on sexual difference, and that it was probably not the most dominant theory either, in the classical and early modern periods. However, there is still merit in Laqueur’s ‘one-sex...