Women, Gender and Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and France

Edited by Kathleen Hardesty Doig and Felicia Berger Sturzer. Includes a chapter by College at Brockport faculty member Morag Martin: \u27Augustine Debaralle, insensée, folle, charlatane, et enfin tout ce qu\u27il vous plaira\u27: A Female Healer\u27s Struggle for Medical Recognition in Napoleonic France. Based on encyclopedias, medical journals, historical, and literary sources, this collection of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the intersection of women, gender, and disease in England and France. Diverse critical perspectives highlight contributions women made to the scientific and medical communities of the eighteenth century. In spite of obstacles encountered in spaces dominated by men, women became midwives, and wrote self-help manuals on women\u27s health, hygiene, and domestic economy. Excluded from universities, they nevertheless contributed significantly to such fields as anatomy, botany, medicine, and public health. Enlightenment perspectives on the nature of the female body, childbirth, diseases specific to women, gender, sex, masculinity and femininity, adolescence, and sexual differentiation inform close readings of English and French literary texts. Treatises by Montpellier vitalists influenced intellectuals and physicians such as Nicolas Chambon, Pierre Cabanis, Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, Jules-Joseph Virey, and Theophile de Bordeu. They impacted the exchange of letters and production of literary works by Julie de Lespinasse, Francoise de Graffigny, Nicolas Chamfort, Mary Astell, Frances Burney, Lawrence Sterne, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. In our post-modern era, these essays raise important questions regarding women as subjects, objects, and readers of the philosophical, medical, and historical discourses that framed the project of enlightenment.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/1356/thumbnail.jp