Generating Bodies And Gendered Selves
Subtitle: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (In Vivo)
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: December 30, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780295986418
Subjects: History of medicine; Human reproduction, growth & development; Medical; Medical / Nursing; British Isles; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Gender Studies; History; England; Gynecology; Human reproduction; Obstetrics
Description: Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time when medical texts first appeared in English in large numbers and the first signs of modern medicine were emerging both in theory and in practice, medical discourse of the body was richly interwoven with cultural concerns. Through close readings of a wide range of English-language medical texts from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, from learned anatomies and works of observational embryology to popular books of physic and commercial midwifery manuals, Keller looks at the particular assumptions about bodies and selves that medical language inevitably enfolds.