This interdisciplinary historical paper focuses on the past and current state of diverse forms of surgical hysterectomy as a global phenomenon relating to population control and sterilisation. It is a paper grounded in historical inquiry but is unconventional relative to the norms of historical scholarship both in its wide geographical scope informed by the methodologies of global and intercultural history, in its critique of current clinical practices informed by recent feminist, race, biopolitical and disability studies, and by its engagement with scholarship in health sociology and medical anthropology which has focused on questions of gender and healthcare inequalities. The first part of the paper surveys existing medical, social-scientific and humanistic research on the racial, class, disability and caste inequalities which have emerged in the recent global proliferation of hysterectomy; the second part of the paper is about the diverse global rationales underlying radical gynaecological surgeries as a form of sterilisation throughout the long twentieth century. Radical gynaecological surgeries have been promoted for several different purposes throughout their history and, of course, are sometimes therapeutically necessary. However, they have often disproportionately impacted the most disadvantaged groups in several different global societies and have frequently been concentrated in populations that are already maligned on the basis of race, ethnicity, age, criminality, disability, gender deviation, lower class, caste or poverty. This heritage continues to inform current practices and contributes to ongoing global inequalities of healthcare.

This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The article focusses on French, English, German, Austrian, and Italian sources of the 19th century that discussed the history of sexual medicine, relating these accounts to recent attempts to historicise sexology. It considers how forms of colonial hierarchy and exoticist views of non-European cultures impacted the dismissal of ‘ilm al-bah among European sexual scientists and how they may continue to exert an influence on forms of modern historical inquiry that are not attentive to scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine.

Reviewed by: Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction by Jennifer Mitchell Alison M. Downham Moore (bio) Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction, by Jennifer Mitchell; pp. x + 216. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020, $85.00. Jennifer Mitchell's Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction systematically applies the sexological category of masochism to eight nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary works, following the recent trend in literary studies of using such terms to parse fiction referring to the torturous aspects of love and attraction. Doing so, though, risks reducing the intricacies, subtleties, and plenitude of Victorian portraits of paradoxical motive, internal conflict, and sensory tension. While masochism and sadomasochism were downgraded in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 in the view that such things were no longer to be considered necessarily pathological, masochism is still held to have exquisite heuristic value among literary scholars influenced by Gilles Deleuze's ahistorical reading of the historian and novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in the 1967 essay Coldness and Cruelty. From the 1940s to the 1970s, masochism became an important concept for Austrian and German psychoanalysts migrating to the United States, and in the 1980s and 1990s it re-emerged as an object of American feminist critique before blossoming as a symbol of postmodern sexuality in Anglophone critical theory. Mitchell leans on all these [End Page 335] twentieth-century iterations of the concept of masochism, "ahistorically" reading it back onto works of Victorian fiction (33). Intriguing though the idea is of a"transhistorical lineage of masochistic subjectivities," this book provides little sense of how writers such as Charlotte Brontë and George Moore could have engaged in an "anticipation of clinical discourse," how Brontë "theorizes masochism even before it is named," or even more anachronistically, how Octave Mirbeau "mimics many of what Deleuze claims as the core components of masochism" (16, 41, 56, 97). The chapters on Brontë's Villette (1853), Moore's A Drama in Muslin (1886) and D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915) are those most likely to interest readers of this journal, while those on Jean Rhys's Quartet (1928) and on Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers (1981) fall outside the Victorian era. Mitchell's claim is that all these works are related through their common inheritance of a masochistic genealogy, which also includes two renowned French works, Mirbeau's The Torture Garden (1899) and Pauline Réage's The Story of O (1954), as well as Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs (1870), which originally inspired the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's slanderous medical neologism of 1886, using Masoch's name. There are several references to the "literary roots" of masochism and "the well-established connection between literature and sexology" (14, 85). But it is unclear precisely what Mitchell thinks is the nature of this connection. It is surely more complex than a matter of sexologists merely formalizing sexual types that had already been fully modeled in the characters of well-known literary texts. We are told that "literary works imagine perversions and pseudoscientific works codify them" (89). But this offers little elucidation of how both literature and sexology participated interdiscursively in what Michel Foucault called an "incitement to discourse" (Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1 [Gallimard, 1976], 25). Several important scholarly books have indeed probed the relationship between sexual psychiatry's delineation of sadism and masochism as pathologies and nineteenth-century fictional works, especially Romana Byrne's Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism (2013) and Niklaus Largier's In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (2007). The central claim of Ordinary Masochisms might also be situated within the larger movement of international scholarship exploring the important conceptual work that nineteenth-century literary works clearly performed in the elaboration of modern sexual possibilities that were nominalized, categorized, and clinically studied by sexual scientists. Mitchell acknowledges that Victorian aestheticizations of suffering, death, disease, disability, and pain were also found in both gothic and decadent genres of fiction and poetry. But curiously she does not pursue the idea of these earlier genres as likely influences on...

In this extended review essay we discuss the lectures on sexuality which Foucault delivered in the 1960s, published in a single volume in 2018. The first part of the volume comprises five lectures given at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 to psychology students. The second part is Foucault’s course ‘The Discourse of Sexuality’, given at the experimental University of Vincennes in 1969 in the philosophy department. We explore both the themes of the lectures, and the important editorial materials provided by Claude-Olivier Doron which situate these themes in relation to recent developments in the history and philosophy of biology, gender and sexuality. These lectures provide some important and surprising additions to Foucault’s more familiar interest in sexuality, with discussion of plant and animal biology, sex differentiation, the question of sexual behaviour, perversion and infantile sexuality.

This paper asks questions about the resilience of radical gynaecological surgeries, such as hysterectomy and ovariectomy, from the moment of their widespread use in Western European and American practices of the late nineteenth century, to their renewed increase in the Indian subcontinent and Africa into our own time.

Abstract It might be expected that the demographic statistical evidence of women’s relative longevity that emerged in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European science might constrain the rampant medicalisation of women’s ageing in modern biomedicine. French demographers such as Antoine Deparcieux in 1746, Louis-François Benoiston de Châteauneuf in 1818, and Louis Noiret in 1850 explicitly argued that the rejection of the medicalisation of the final cessation of menses was a natural conclusion to draw from the mortality data they presented: women in the age group from 40 to 60 years were not more fragile as evidenced by their greater rates of survival relative to men, so there was no need to consider the cessation of menses to be a ‘critical time’ requiring special medical care. But women’s ageing proved too valuable to be ignored in doctors’ postures of debunking supposedly traditional myths. It served as a pedagogic case example for the induction of doctoral candidates at the Montpellier, Paris, and Strasbourg faculties into the bioscientific view of women’s diseases. In these contexts, it helped to justify the inclusion of older women in the emerging specialist fields of hygiene, gynaecology, and psychiatry. It helped not only to produce the bifurcation of women’s diseases from men’s, but indeed also the cleaving of ageing morbidity from mortality. Section Headings: • Cancers of the Breast, Ovaries, and Uterus in the Critical Age of Women, 1650–850 • The Demographic Discovery of Women’s Longevity • Life Cycles and Ageing Morbidity in French Encyclopedism • Vitalism and the Cessation of Menstruation

Abstract This chapter surveys seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Latin and French scholars who first identified the cessation of menstruation due to age, evaluating claims made by other historians who have attributed menopause symptomatology to ancient and early modern medicine. Early modern physicians, for the most part, simply did not consider the end of menses a matter of medical concern at all. Nineteenth-century doctors in general made great mileage of their supposed inheritance from ancient medicine, even as they radically displaced many of its central presuppositions. However, ancient medicine of women’s health was innovatively reimagined between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in ways that neither Hippocrates nor Galen would have recognised. The pathological view of menopause was a novel, mostly French confection of the long nineteenth century which has too often been assumed to derive from ancient and early modern lineages. Section Headings: • The Early Modern Naturalisation of the Final Cessation of Menses • Menstruation and Its End from Iatrochemical to Iatromechanical Perspectives • The Influence of the Halle School? • Midwives and Accoucheurs

Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by Frenchmen medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors’ professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years. This book is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women’s ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It also reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women’s ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.

Previous articleNext article No AccessModernSean Quinlan. Morbid Undercurrents: Medical Subcultures in Postrevolutionary France. xiv + 336 pp., illus., notes, index. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. $45 (cloth); ISBN 9781501758331. E-book available.Alison Downham MooreAlison Downham Moore Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 113, Number 3September 2022 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721042 Views: 31Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

While hysterectomy surgery has seen a drop in developed economies, it persists in the global South reflecting a racist, sexist, and prejudicial legacy. Hysterectomy rates have declined in developed economies over the past 30 years. But in India, Africa, and South America, they have increased. This raises the question of whether forms of gender, race, […]

Abstract In the second half of the nineteenth century, the new rise of gynaecological surgery produced an important surge of international research and intercultural communication between medical scholars with an interest in women’s ageing reproductive organs. Women in their forties with common benign tumours and cysts were now seen, by some surgeons in both France and England, as important targets for the experimental development of surgeries of the abdomen. In French medicine, the uterus and ovaries had long been viewed as monstrous and troublesome throughout women’s lifespan, from puberty to pregnancy, in menstruation, lactation, and menopause, causing nervous and mental illnesses as well as cancers and other gynaecological pathologies. In young women they were deemed necessary for conception, particularly in the intensifying pronatalist culture of the late nineteenth century and increasing anxieties about negative population growth. In older women, on the other hand, the uterus and ovaries were often described by doctors as shrivelled and useless at best, often perverting, cancerous, or degenerate at worst. French treatments of ovarian opotherapy for the alleviation of symptoms of surgical menopause produced by hysterectomy and oophorectomy were quickly extrapolated to women in natural menopause. This was the origin of current practices of treating older women with hysterectomy and hormone replacement therapy.Section Headings: • The Emergence of Gynaecological Surgery and Artificial Menopause • Jules Péan’s Dangerous Experimental Surgeries and Their Rationales • The Internationalism and Caution of Samuel Pozzi • Ovarian Opotherapy in the Treatment of Surgical and Natural Menopause

This article surveys available evidence of disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic to Australian university-based research and to the research training pipeline, considering both the long-term implications of this disruption, as well as the disproportionate impacts on higher degree research candidates, early-career researchers and women academics with carer responsibilities. Drawing on existing global and local research studies, media reports, internal institutional documents, policy and advisory documents, data from the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Research Council, the article argues that specific targeted management interventions and federal policy changes will be needed for the equitable and sustainable restoration of research capacity in the challenging funding environment beyond 2022.

Abstract The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in relation to concepts transformed from their origin in both the ancient Mediterranean world and in medieval Islamicate medicine. We then consider how the general idea of aphrodisiacs became widely discredited in mid-nineteenth-century scientific medicine until after the First World War in France and in the US, alongside their commercial proliferation in the context of new colonial trade exchanges between Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and South America. In both examples, we propose that global entanglements played a significant role in both the cohesion and the discreditation of the medical category of aphrodisiacs.

This paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault's statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck's own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple 'emporal layers.' The layering model in the history of concepts may be useful for complicating the historical periodizations commonly invoked by historians of sexuality, overcoming historiographic temptations to reduce complex cultural and intellectual phenomena to a unified Zeitgeist. The paper also shows that a haunting reference to 'concepts' among scholars of the long history of sexual medicine indicates the emergence of a de facto methodology of conceptual history, albeit one in need of further refinement. It is proposed that reading Koselleck alongside Foucault provides a useful starting-point for precisely this kind of theoretical development.

From the very moment the concept of sexuality emerged in nineteenth-century European medical and psychiatric thought, it became a topic of historicization. This historicization formed a consistent habit of thought in many of the medical and psychiatric texts that first enunciated sexuality as a distinct field of meaning. Dialogue between doctors and the first historians of sexuality informed the emergence of both sexology and of the historiography of sexuality. This dialogue suggests a need to rethink the origins of sexual historiography, situating current historians within a continuous genealogy, rather than as transcendental observers marked by epistemological rupture from earlier biological theories of sexual evolution.

This paper considers the hypothesis that modern gynecological practices relating to sex-steroid hormones reflect modern sedentary lifeways, along with pharmaceutical commercial pressures, to produce a widespread medical perception that all postmenopausal women need estrogen replacement therapy to avoid osteoporosis (bone fracture risk resulting from low bone density).Like the concept of menopause itself, the concept of universal menopausal osteopenia (low bone density) is a modern medical construction.Numerous clinical trials have demonstrated that estrogen replacement therapies (ERT) help women to retain bone mass in ageing [33], but several trials have also shown that ERT is primarily effective in sedentary women who do not exercise [4; 5], Recent studies of ancient human bones suggest that bone-mass in women was higher in the pre-agricultural ancestral past due to greater physical activity demands and greater nutrient density than are common in modern corporeal lifeways [1; 23; 31].From an evolutionary perspective, the metabolic nature of bone as a tissue that can be increased or reabsorbed in response not only to sex-steroid hormone levels but also to dietary mineral and protein status, vitamin D, and mechanical loading appears adapted to an environment that was abundant in nutritional micronutrients, sunlight exposure and regular, demanding physical activity [9; 18].Bone is highly metabolic tissue that is continually 'turning-over': Osteoblasts build it and osteoclasts dissolve it according to mechanical stimulus and hormonal signals, and relative to available nutrientsparticularly calcium, magnesium, protein and vitamin D [15].Throughout youth, the ratio of growth to reabsorption is highest, with a period of peak bone-mass acquisition between ages 16-35 [15].During pregnancy and lactation, women become more bone-catabolic in order to draw from the mineral reserves in bone to nourish infant development [18].Bone loss then is not per se a pathological process.After age 50, the ratio of reabsorption to growth is generally higher in everyone, but if a healthy reserve has been amassed in youth, this is unlikely to result in old-age fractures [15; 18], However, there are stressors that can prohibit the