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Imagining Women’s Fertility before Technology

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Abstract

In the modern world, technology has enabled us to understand the connections between the menstrual cycle and female fertility and to observe the reproductive process even from conception. Unable to see inside the living body, however, eighteenth-century people imagined reproduction and fertility holistically. Their understanding of fertility was inseparable from the way in which they imagined the inner-workings of the humoral body. Although menstruation was understood to be connected to reproduction, it was considered unreliable, a peripheral indicator of fertility. Above all, the best marker of a woman’s fecundity was good overall health.

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Notes

  1. B Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans T Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); SL Erikson. “Fetal Views: Histories and Habits of Looking at the Fetus in Germany,” Journal of Medical Humanities 28, 4 (2007), 187–212; T Laqueur, Making Sex; Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

  2. P Dionis, Traité Generale des Accouchemens, qui instruit de tout ce qu’il faut faire pour être habile Accoucheur (Paris, 1724), 65, 71–72. For good discussions of metaphors surrounding fertility, see M Fissell, “Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England,” Gender & History 7 (1995), 433–456; C McClive, “L’âge des fleurs: le passage de l’enfance à l’adolescence dans l’imaginaire medical du XVIIe siècle,” Biblio 17, 172 (2007), 171–185.

  3. S Pilloud and M Louis-Courvoisier, “The Intimate Experience of the Body in the Eighteenth Century: Between Interiority and Exteriority,” Medical History 47 (2003), 451–472; A Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); EA Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2003).

  4. Blockages can also be seen in iatromechanism and blood quality in iatrochemistry. See Pilloud and Louis-Courvoisier, “Intimate Experience”, 460–463.

  5. N Jewson, “Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in Eighteenth-Century England,” Sociology 9 (1974), 369–385; LW Smith, “‘An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper’: The Experience of Pain in Early Eighteenth-Century England and France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, 4 (2008) 459–480; W Wild, Medicine-by-Post: The Changing Voice of Illness in Eighteenth-Century British Consultation Letters and Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 6.

  6. Laqueur, Making Sex, 35–43.

  7. See the debate in Isis: T Laqueur, “Sex in the Flesh”, Isis 94 (2003), 300–306; L Schiebinger, “Skelettestreit”, Isis 94 (2003), 307–313; M Stolberg, “A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe”, Isis 94 (2003), 274–299.

  8. K Harvey makes a similar critique: “The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England,” Gender & History 14 (2002), 202–223.

  9. For good examples, see: V Fildes, ed. Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (London and New York, 1990); J Gélis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991); A McLaren, Reproductive Rituals (London: Methuen, 1984).

  10. W Churchill, “The Medical Practice of the Sexed Body: Women, Men, and Disease in Britain, circa 1600–1740,” Social History of Medicine 18, 1 (2005), 3–22.

  11. C McClive, “Menstrual Knowledge in Early Modern France,” in Menstruation: A Cultural History, eds. A Shail and G Howie (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 76–89. See also Laqueur, Making Sex, 35–43.

  12. É-F Geoffroy, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine (Paris), MSS 5241–5245. Physicians charged their patients on a sliding scale according to their finances. L Brockliss and C Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 324, 541, 545.

  13. For an overview of consultation letters, see L Brockliss, “Consultation by Letter in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris: The Medical Practice of Étienne-François Geoffroy,” in French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century, eds. A La Berge and M Feingold (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 79–117; Smith, “Unaccountable Distemper;” Wild, Medicine-By-Post.

  14. N Venette, La Géneration de l’Homme, ou Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal, Considéré dans l’État du Mariage, vol. 2 (London, 1751), 38–39. See also C McClive, “The Hidden Truths of the Belly: the Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe,” Social History of Medicine 15, 2 (2002), 209–227.

  15. P Crawford, “Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present 91 (1981), 47–73; M Stolberg, “A Woman’s Hell? Medical Perceptions of Menopause in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73 (1999), 420–425.

  16. McClive, “L’âge des fleurs”, 183.

  17. H King, The Disease of Virgins: Greensickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2004), 42.

  18. Venette, Géneration de l’Homme (1751), 26.

  19. J Freind, Emmenologia, trans. T Dale (London, 1729), 70.

  20. Mme de Lievain, “Trésor de la Santé (1725),” Wellcome Library (London), WMS 3258, f. 128, two remedies “pour une femme qui ne peut avoir ses fleurs”.

  21. LW Smith, “Women’s Health Care in England and France (1650–1770),” (Ph.D, thesis, University of Essex, 2002), 64–70.

  22. Cure-all remedies were commonly used at all levels of medical practice, from ‘quacks’ to physicians. The official French pharmacopeia from mid-century contained the Styptic potion (to stop all forms of bleeding) and the Bellost pills (good for everything), among other multi-purpose remedies. Formules Medicinales de L’Hostel-Dieu de Paris, ou Pharmacopée (Paris, 1753), 67, 155.

  23. M Hanuche, “Ce livre,” Wellcome Library (London), WMS 2777, f. 42: “Remede pour une personne qui a les palles couleurs causées par des obstructions de la rate ou qui a quelque douleur dans le bas ventre.”

  24. MC de Beringhe, “Recueil des Remedes,” Wellcome Library (London), WMS 1138, f. 25, “Contre les pales couleurs et la jaunisse.”

  25. De Beringhe, “Recueil,” ff. 12–13 (lower belly remedies) and ff. 24–28 (women’s remedies).

  26. Digestion would later become part of the diagnosis again. King, Virgins, 21–25, 107–110.

  27. Freind, Emmenologia, 78. Men suffering from piles were also thought to have these symptoms when they needed to be bled. M Stolberg, “The Monthly Malady: A History of Premenstrual Suffering,” Medical History 44, 3 (2000), 307.

  28. Hélvetius, Traité des Pertes de Sang, de quelque espece qu’elles soient, avec leur Remede Specifique, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1706), 20, 45, 94.

  29. BIUM MS 5243, f. 103, Detaile de la maladie du pere Pascal Capucin de Chaumont, 19 November 1723; Ibid., f. 105, Geoffroy’s response, n.d. On male menstruation, see G Pomata, “Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine,” in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, eds. V Finucci and K Brownlee (Durham: Duke University Press), 109–152.

  30. BIUM MS 5245, ff. 36–37, Mynard to Geoffroy, 26 August 1729.

  31. BIUM MS 5245, ff. 38–39, Geoffroy to Mr Puzos for Mme Duchemin, 6th September 1729.

  32. McClive, “L’âge des fleurs,” 180–181, 183.

  33. Dionis, Traité General, 72.

  34. L Joubert, Erreurs Populaires au Fait de la Medecine et Regime de Santé (Bordeaux, 1578), 206; L Bourgeois (dite Boursier), Observations Diverses sur la Sterilité, Perte de Fruict, Foecundité, Accouchements et Maladies des Femmes et Enfants Nouveaux Naiz (Paris, 1642), 1–2; N Venette, La Géneration de l’Homme ou le Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal Divise en Quatre Parties (Cologne, 1721), 297.

  35. G Mauquest de la Motte, Traité Complet des Accouchemens Naturels, Non Naturels, et Contre Nature (Paris, 1722), 12–14.

  36. S Quinlan, The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

  37. De la Motte, for example, recommended stretching the woman’s vagina if she and her husband had disproportionate genitals: Traité Complet, 15. Venette, Géneration de l’Homme (1721) outlines several of the causes of impotence, 273–288.

  38. De Lignac, De L’Homme, 262.

  39. FJB Potier, The Case of Impotency Debated, in the Late Famous Tryal at Paris, vol. 1 (London, 1714), 7–12.

  40. SAD Tissot, Onanism: or, A Treatise upon the Disorders produced by Masturbation: or, the Dangerous Effects of Secret and Excessive Venery, trans. A Hume (London, 1766), 159, 164, 179, 183.

  41. On lax fibres, see Tissot, Onanism. On passing gonorrhoea to wives, see De la Motte, Traité Complet, 816–820.

  42. De Lignac, De L’Homme, 277–278.

  43. Quinlan, Great Nation.

  44. Many of these ideas remained consistent from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Bourgeois, Observations Diverses, 14; Dionis, Traité Génerale 67–68; De la Motte, Traité Complet, 12, 18; De Lignac, De L’Homme, 267, 362, 404; M Flamant, Le Veritable Medecine, ou le Moyen de se Conserver la Santé (Paris, 1699), 6–7, 54; Joubert, Erreurs Populaires, 206; F Mauriceau, Observations sur la Grossesse et l’Accouchement des Femmes, et sur leurs Maladies & celles des enfans nouveau-nez (Paris, 1694), 238, 306, 409, 484; Venette, Géneration de l’Homme (1721), 297.

  45. J Liébaut, Trois Livres des Maladies et Infirmitez des Femmes (Rouen, 1651), 168–169; L de Serres, Discours de la Nature, Causes, Signes & Curation des Empeschemens de la Conception, & de la Sterilité des Femmes (Lyon, 1625), 262–275.

  46. C Viardel, Observations sur la Pratique des Accouchemens Naturels Contre Nature et Monstreux (Paris, 1674), ch. 9, 10.

  47. See also LW Smith, “La Raillerie des Femmes? Les Femmes, La Sterilité et la Société en France à l’Époque Moderne,” trans. S Deleris, in La Femme en Fleurs: Santé, Sexualité et Génération du Moyen Age aux Lumières, eds. C McClive and N Pellegrin (Saint-Étienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint-Étienne, forthcoming).

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  1. Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, S7N 5A5

    Lisa W. Smith

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Smith, L.W. Imagining Women’s Fertility before Technology. J Med Humanit 31, 69–79 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-009-9097-1

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