The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Like the unheard sound of the proverbial tree falling in a deserted forest, Duden suggests, the organic body may not have existed prior to its invention, and historians should not assume that it did.

Abstract

It may come as a surprise to physicians that the newest frontier in medical history is neither the "patient" nor the "disease" but the "body." Recently, historians and doctors have accepted that disease can be "constructed" along lines dictated by social factors, such as gender, race, and class. Without disputing these possibilities, Duden points out that even the most sensitive of social-constructionist analyses tends to accept biology as an "immutable" reality. She challenges this immutability by exploring perceptions of the female body through 1800 case histories written by Johann Pelargius Storch (1681-c 1752) and develops the intriguing notion that Cartesian three-dimensionality may not have been "discovered" so much as "invented." Like the unheard sound of the proverbial tree falling in a deserted forest, Duden suggests, the organic body may not have existed prior to its invention, and historians should not assume that it did. Her provocative premise is important; however