ABSTRACT
In The Woman Beneath the Skin, widely considered a conceptual milestone in the history of medicine, Barbara Duden complained that the techniques of historical demography ‘silence the body’:
To social historians of my generation historical demography has become a primary source of statements about body-mediated phenomena [in which] the characteristics of the body within a statistical population are — perceived as probable attributes of an object: as rates of birth, morbidity, reproduction and mortality. 1
