Doctoring the past

Anne Summers

• The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in 18th-Century Germany by Barbara Duden, translated by Thomas Dunlap
  Harvard, 241 pp, £19.95, September 1991, ISBN 0 674 95403 3
• The Nature of their Bodies: Women and their Doctors in Victorian Canada by Wendy Mitchinson
  Toronto, 474 pp, £40.00, August 1991, ISBN 0 8020 5902 3
• Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950 by Lesley Hall
  Polity, 218 pp, £35.00, May 1991, ISBN 0 7456 0741 1

Is there such a thing as the history of the body, and, if so, how might we study it? The idea of the body as a constant, a given, whose components and attributes must always be there to be known or discovered, seems self-evident to the medical patient, the medical practitioner, the micro-biologist of the present day. Much writing in medical history takes it for granted that our current approaches to knowing and describing the body correspond exactly to an objective reality which has been unchanging over time, and that matching the medical treatises and descriptions of past eras against this reality is an unproblematic exercise.