MITPressLog RSS feed
Secrets of
Women by Katharine Park (Zone Books), has
won the 2007 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize given by the
History of Science Society.
Here’s what the judges had to say
about the book:
Katharine Park’s
Secrets of
Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human
Dissection is an
outstanding demonstration of the fundamental insights that consideration of
gender brings to the history of science. The womb, Park shows, became the
privileged object of dissection in medical images and texts in the 15th and 16th
century due to both its significance for generation and the challenges posed by
its anatomical complexity. Whereas depictions of male anatomy focused on the
outside of the body, the female figure came to illustrate internal anatomy in
general. Far from being an aberration, then, women’s bodies and their secrets
became the paradigm for the secrets of life, and were crucial for the
development of anatomical knowledge from the thirteenth century until Andreas
Vesalius’s On the Fabric of
the Human Body of 1543. In
this exciting challenge to existing historiography, Park traces the role of
women and the female body through several Italian case studies: a religious
visionary, a lactating virgin, Florentine matrons, and the executed criminal of
Vesalius’s famous frontispiece. While leading her readers into discourses and
practices quite remote from contemporary experience, Park challenges
well-established opinions about religious prohibitions against dissection, the
transgressive nature of physician’s desire to understand women’s secrets, the
misogynous motivation of Renaissance doctors’s critique of vernacular midwives’s
knowledge, and the “one-sex” model of the human body previously assumed to
characterize anatomical understanding from Galen to the Enlightenment. Katharine
Park does all of this in a book that is richly documented, lucidly argued,
soberly provocative, and both fittingly and beautifully illustrated.
Comments