Making Women's Medicine Masculine by Green Monica H.;

Author:Green, Monica H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIG. 6.1 A sixteenth-century woodcut depicting a female student at the medical school of Salerno.

In March of 1578, the physician Corc Óg Ó Cadhla resided temporarily at the house of Brian Caomhánach in Kilkenny County, Ireland. He was there to treat Caomhánach’s two daughters for menstrual disorders.114 Corc Óg Ó Cadhla is no representative of a radical Renaissance transformation in medicine. A century after the printing press began to put medical texts into mass production, he is copying out an entire medical encyclopedia by hand, wishing he had proper vellum to write on instead of paper and apologizing that his handwriting is not better. A century after Niccolò Leoniceno had called for rejection of the corrupted texts and even more corrupted Latinity of medieval writers, he is copying, in Irish, Bernard of Gordon’s early fourteenth-century text, the Lily of Medicine, which could hardly have been considered cutting edge even 200 years earlier. Yet in coming into the home of this mighty man, Brian Caomhànach, and treating his daughters for their gynaecological complaints, Corc Óg Ó Cadhla, off at the edges of Europe, shows the breadth of the successful masculinization of gynaecology.

Gynaecology was not uniformly incorporated into the practice of all fifteenth-and sixteenth-century physicians and surgeons, of course. There is no obstetrical material whatsoever in the Surgery of the Italian surgeon, Giovanni da Vigo (1450–1525), for example, and besides several substantive chapters on apostemes, indurations, and ulcers of the breasts, he limits his gynaecological material to the three perfunctory chapters on ulcers of the vagina and uterus.115 Yet as with the exceptional cases we saw in the Middle Ages, da Vigo’s context explains this lacuna: he spent the bulk of his career in service to a series of popes, in whose courts his interactions with female patients are likely to have been very limited.116

Nor was the geographic spread of this Renaissance ‘revolution’ uniform. Gynaecology in fifteenth-century England, although itself demonstrating signs of increased development, was largely unaffected by the new writing on the Continent.117 In the sixteenth century, aside from Richard Jonas who translated Rösslin’s Rosegarden into English in 1540 and Thomas Raynalde who revised it in 1545, none of the several dozen ‘modern’ authors on women’s medicine hailed from England, and it would not be until well into the seventeenth century that England produced any gynaecological work of international prominence.118 Nevertheless, even here there is evidence for the normativeness of male interest in and practice of gynaecology, as well as for the erasure of female authority. Robert Green of Welby, for example, while copying out a Middle English version of the Trotula in 1544, ascribed authorship not to ‘a woman named Rota’ (as had the other, earlier copy of this version) but to ‘one expert in the anatomy and special [things] concerning the parts of a woman and the diseases often happening to them’. He does not explicitly say this was a man, but neither does he raise the possibility of female authorship. Later in the century, John Wotton, MD,

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