**'Illuminating, thoughtful and scholarly' FINANCIAL TIMES'Does a fascinating job of exploring the history of women's bodies' GREG JENNER'Mind-blowing, fascinating stuff' BBC WOMAN'S HOUR**'Authoritative, rich and wide-ranging, this is an immensely impressive work of scholarship' GUARDIANThroughout history, religious scholars, medical men and - occasionally - women themselves, have moulded thought on what 'makes' a...

The turbulent history of women’s bodies, from classical Greece to the modern dayBreasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. Across history, these body parts have told women who they are and what they should do. Although knowledge of each part has changed through time, none of them tells a simple story. The way they work and in some cases even their existence have been debated. They can be seen as powerful or as disgusting, as relevant only to reproduction or as sources of ...

“Never has medical history been more entertaining” (Dr Jennifer Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible) than in this turbulent history of women’s bodies from classical Greece to the modern ageA New Yorker Best Book of the YearBreasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. Across history, these body parts have told women who they are and what they should do. Although knowledge of each part has changed through time, none o...

This is an inspirational book intended to lead you through a potential road map for how to develop an intimate relationship and walk closer with God. If you are not interested in developing a closer relationship with God, this book will help you to live life better and make you better at life.The ideas are presented from a perspective that encourages introspection from those who read it and motivates them to make better choices so they live their lives with fewer regrets.

From an acclaimed author in the field, this is a compelling study of the origins and history of the disease commonly seen as afflicting young unmarried girls.Understanding of the condition turned puberty and virginity into medical conditions, and Helen King stresses the continuity of this disease through history,depsite enormous shifts in medical understanding and technonologies, and drawing parallels with the modern illness of anorexia.Examining its roots in the classical ...

Throughout history, religious scholars, medical men and - occasionally - women themselves, have moulded thought on what 'makes' a woman. She has been called the weaker sex, the fairer sex, the purer sex, among many other monikers. Often, she has been defined simply as 'Not A Man'.Today, we are more aware than ever of the complex relationship between our bodies and our identities. But contrary to what some may believe, what makes a woman is a question that has always been open-ended...

The Gynaeciorum libri, the 'Books on [the diseases of] women,' a compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on gynaecology, is the inspiration for this intensive exploration of the origins of a subfield of medicine. This collection was first published in 1566, with a second edition in 1586/8 and a third, running to 1097 folio pages, in 1597. While examining the origins of the compendium, Helen King here concentrates on its reception, looking at a range of different uses of the book in th...

Hippocrates' Woman demonstrates the role of Hippocratic ideas about the female body in the subsequent history of western gynaecology. It examines these ideas not only in the social and cultural context in which they were first produced, but also the ways in which writers up to the Victorian period have appealed to the material in support of their own theories.Among the conflicting tange of images of women given in the Hippocratic corpus existed one tradition of the female b...

By far the most influential work on the history of the body, across a wide range of academic disciplines, remains that of Thomas Laqueur. This book puts on trial the one-sex/two-sex model of Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud through a detailed exploration of the ways in which two classical stories of sexual difference were told, retold and remade from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Agnodike, the 'first midwife' who disguises herself as a man and t...

Dossier : L’objet est ici de réévaluer l’histoire et les représentations des mères et de la maternité dans le monde grec ancien. Qu’est ce que devenir mère dans la Grèce ancienne ? Le dossier aborde cette question, que ce soit dans ses aspects démographiques, avec l’épineuse question du contrôle des naissances pour le bien de l’oikos, dans ses aspects physiologiques et médicaux en posant la question des liens entre maternité et santé, ainsi que dans ses composantes religieuses en analysant...

This book shows how in nineteenth-century Britain, confronted with the newly industrialized and urbanized modern world, writers, artists, journalists and impresarios tried to gain an overview of contemporary history. They drew on two successive but competing conceptual models of overview: the panorama and the compilation. Both models claimed to offer a holistic picture of the present moment, but took very different approaches. This book shows that panoramas (360° views previously associate...

This book explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. The legacy of Romantic historicism, the professionalization of the historical discipline, and even the growth of social history, all heightened the stakes. This book brings together Victorian histories and novels to show how these parallel genres responded to the challenges of contemporary history writing in divergent ways. Many historians shrank from...