Davenport Lecture: How Gender Changed The History of Medicine
Davenport Lecture: How Gender Changed The History of Medicine
Davenport Lecture: How Gender Changed The History of Medicine
HISTORY OF MEDICINE
I BEGIN WITH A RIDDLE THAT MADE THE
ECONOMIC CHANGE.
CONSTRUCTING.1
women’s health care helped to animate this new historical orientation toward
women lacked knowledge of their own bodies. How did thEIR ignorance
come about? Ordinary young women sought more control, not just over their
sexuality, but over other stages of the female life course: pregnancy,
of that change. The first was the insistence that women, not just men, be
were closely intertwined from the outset. For the discipline of medical history,
about modern Western medical science that, since the 19th century, had
the project was even more transformative: a new area of inquiry devoted
constructing.4
women’s health care helped to animate this new historical orientation toward
6
finding the women. Feminist “consciousness raising” groups complained that
women lacked knowledge of their own bodies. How did this ignorance come
about? Ordinary young women sought more control, not just over their
sexuality, but over other stages of the female life course: pregnancy,