Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 ‘Difficulties, at present in no Degree clear'd up’: The Controversial Mother, 1600–1800
- 3 Monstrous Issues: The Uterus as Riddle in Early Modern Medical Texts
- 4 Surveilling the Secrets of the Female Body: The Contest for Reproductive Authority in the Popular Press of the Seventeenth Century
- 5 ‘Made in Imitation of Real Women and Children’: Obstetrical Machines in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Transcending the Sexed Body: Reason, Sympathy, and ‘Thinking Machines’ in the Debates over Male Midwifery
- 7 Emma Martin and the Manhandled Womb in Early Victorian England
- 8 Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman
- 9 ‘Those Parts Peculiar to Her Organization’: Some Observations on the History of Pelvimetry, a Nearly Forgotten Obstetric Subspeciality
- 10 ‘She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Challenge to Medical Depictions of Female Masturbation in The Doctor's Wife
- 11 Mrs Robinson's ‘Day-book of Iniquity’: Reading Bodies of/and Evidence in the Context of the 1858 Medical Reform Act
- 12 Rebecca's Womb: Irony and Gynaecology in Rebecca
- 13 Representations of Illegal Abortionists in England, 1900–1967
- 14 Afterword: Reading History as/and Vision
- Index
9 - ‘Those Parts Peculiar to Her Organization’: Some Observations on the History of Pelvimetry, a Nearly Forgotten Obstetric Subspeciality
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 ‘Difficulties, at present in no Degree clear'd up’: The Controversial Mother, 1600–1800
- 3 Monstrous Issues: The Uterus as Riddle in Early Modern Medical Texts
- 4 Surveilling the Secrets of the Female Body: The Contest for Reproductive Authority in the Popular Press of the Seventeenth Century
- 5 ‘Made in Imitation of Real Women and Children’: Obstetrical Machines in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Transcending the Sexed Body: Reason, Sympathy, and ‘Thinking Machines’ in the Debates over Male Midwifery
- 7 Emma Martin and the Manhandled Womb in Early Victorian England
- 8 Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman
- 9 ‘Those Parts Peculiar to Her Organization’: Some Observations on the History of Pelvimetry, a Nearly Forgotten Obstetric Subspeciality
- 10 ‘She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Challenge to Medical Depictions of Female Masturbation in The Doctor's Wife
- 11 Mrs Robinson's ‘Day-book of Iniquity’: Reading Bodies of/and Evidence in the Context of the 1858 Medical Reform Act
- 12 Rebecca's Womb: Irony and Gynaecology in Rebecca
- 13 Representations of Illegal Abortionists in England, 1900–1967
- 14 Afterword: Reading History as/and Vision
- Index
Summary
In an unsigned piece published in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology in 1851, the anonymous author takes a moment to indulge in a fulsome description of the marvels of the female pelvis and its fleshy accessories:
It is in that portion of the body in immediate connexion with those parts peculiar to her organization that the greatest beauty of form is found in woman, as though they were the fons et origo of corporeal as well as mental loveliness […] the contours of the back are of the most admirable purity; the region of the kidneys is elongated, the scapulae scarcely visible; the loins grandly curved forwards, the haunches prominent and rounded; in short, the posterior surface of the torso in woman is unquestionably the chef d'oeuvre of nature.
Anonymous's anatomical Venus delights with her beauty founded on her fertility; her magnificent soft curves seem meant to indicate her physical and spiritual readiness for woman's most supposedly sacred task: childbearing.
Unfortunately, there is a problem here. For all we and Anonymous know, the beautiful loins of this ostensibly healthy female specimen might conceal a multitude of anatomical sins. Her pelvic conformation might be twisted and contracted in eccentric ways due to a host of possible factors: heredity, accident, or diseases. In an age devoid of many of our modern techniques for foetal imaging and surgical intervention, each birthing case represented a possible threat to the life of both mother and child.
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- The Female Body in Medicine and Literature , pp. 135 - 147Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011