The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany

by Barbara Duden

In this provocative study Barbara Duden asserts that the most basic biological and medical terms that we use to describe our own bodies―male and female, healthy or sick―are indeed cultural constructions. Duden delves into the records of an eighteenth-century German physician who meticulously documented the medical histories of eighteen hundred women of all ages and backgrounds, often in their own words. This unparalleled record of complaints, symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments reveals a deeply alien understanding of the female body and its functions.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Medical, Medicine, Grad School, Illness, Germany

254 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1991

About the author

Barbara Duden is a German feminist and medical historian. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Hannover. Her work figures significantly in the currents that established the body as a site for historical inquiry. She is one of the founders of the journal Courage, which was in publication from 1976 to 1984. The journal circulated primarily in West Berlin, where it played an extensive role in informing the women's movement.

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love to skip block quotes

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barbara Duden rocks! The book gets better and better as you go because her style of source organization changes, but it's great. The translation doesn't always seem fair to her argument, but you can look past it.

[Rina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Possibly because of issues of translation, I found this volume hard to follow. It could also have to do with the fact that the historian is German and it is inevitable for other countries vocabulary and means of explaining concepts get lost in the translation to another language and means of studying and writing history. That said, the read was colloquial and it helped make sense of a developing understanding of a woman's body as seen through the lens of a doctor who treated them. It is important to note that often there were no physical examinations, but rather self diagnoses and the doctor prescribing based on testimony either read through a message or heard in person. Duden's book draws together two different medical concepts: traditional and the growing medical and scholarly. The treatment of women necessitated the use of both as their health was supervised by themselves, their family and close community. This could include a multitude of different professionals such as apothecaries and midwives. It would be presumptuous to assume that as the 18th century progressed, that women came under the direct control of male doctors and that their health was thus micromanaged by them. The strength of Duden's book lies in the fact that she constantly challenges the modern reader's propensity to attempt to label past ailments with modern diagnoses. These women and their illness MUST be understood in their terms and how they describe them as they processes that they undertake to treat themselves.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using medical histories recorded by an eighteenth century German doctor, Duden attempts to construct an image of the body held by women and their doctor. Because Storch recorded what his female patients we can practically hear their complaints. These women viewed their bodies very differently than we view our bodies. While Duden has a complex argument about the evolution of the body, what I found most engaging was the way she makes the doctor patient relationship vivid. Although it may be an artifact of Duden's efforts at 'construction' I was struck by how similarly these women viewed their bodies and their illnesses. I was disappointed that Duden did not seem interested in the history of these views, instead treating them as timeless. I was also interested in the way the doctor's view of the body and illness, while different from that of the women he treated, allowed him to synchronize his efforts with their complaints. I was struck by the way that his ideas seemed to bear more relationship to his patient's ideas than to the theories of his teachers. This is an important book for thinking about doctor patient relationships as well as the history of ideas about the body.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizarre stuff and difficult to wrap my head around, but fascinating.