Women and medicine in the French Enlightenment : the debate over "maladies des femmes"

Resource Information

The work Women and medicine in the French Enlightenment : the debate over "maladies des femmes" represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Women and medicine in the French Enlightenment : the debate over "maladies des femmes"

Title remainder

the debate over "maladies des femmes"

Statement of responsibility

Lindsay Wilson

Creator

• Wilson, Lindsay B., (Lindsay Blake)

Subject

• History
• History, 18th Century
• Medical jurisprudence -- France -- History -- 18th century
• Medicine -- France -- History -- 18th century
• France
• Women's Health
• Women's Health -- history
• Women -- Health and hygiene -- France -- History -- 18th century

Genre

• History

Language

eng

Summary

In Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment Lindsay Wilson takes a new approach to the social history of medicine by focusing on the key role that women played as both providers and recipients of health care during the Ancien Regime. Wilson pays special attention to three medical controversies involving maladies des femmes in eighteenth-century France: the "miraculous cures" claimed by the Convulsionaries of St. Medard, the uncertainty over the maximum length of pregnancy (and its implications for the legitimacy of heirs) and the debate over the medical effectiveness of mesmerism. Wilson's analysis of these debates reveals how social and political concerns affected the medical community's efforts to establish an enlightened science of medicine which would, in turn, legitimize its own authority. But because the issues of legitimacy, hierarchy and authority raised by the medical causes celebres resonated so deeply throughout French society, debate extended far beyond medical circles to an increasingly engaged public. Such debate reflected a significant shift in the center of politics from the institutions of court, academy, and parlement to journals, theaters, and the streets. Wilson's description of these debates provides insight into the forces that were transforming the family, the church, corporate society, and the state on the eve of the Revolution. She argues for a re-assessment of a period that has been all too easily categorized as an age of triumph - either for enlightenment or for repression. Her work also offers concrete examples of the ways in which sexual symbolism can he employed to maintain social order or promote change. Based on medical treatises, medical topographies, official reports, judicial documents, physicians' correspondence, and memoirs of eighteenth-century women, Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment is a thoroughly interdisciplinary work that will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social history of medicine, women's studies, Enlightenment thought, and French social history

Cataloging source

DNLM/DLC

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography