ABSTRACT
It is in maternity that woman fulfills her physiological destiny; it is her natural "calling," since her whole organic structure is adapted for the perpetuation of the species. Although Michel Foucault's remarks on the maternal body itself are extremely limited, his analysis of biology, medicine, and techniques employed in various institutions in order to discipline the body and make it docile can be useful in analyzing the history of biological and medical theories of the maternal body. In contemporary medicine and biology it seems that scientists can inspect an organism and simply "see" what it is and what it does. As the practice of autopsy and examination of human cadavers became common in the nineteenth century, scientists no longer had to fantasize about the internal organs of the human body. Without the benefit of holding a human uterus in his hands, based on his study of animals, like Hippocrates, Aristotle believed that the human uterus had compartments.
