ABSTRACT
How far does female difference from men extend, and to what degree does the decision that gynaecology is necessary – that the difference is so great that women require their own medical field – relate to specific historical and cultural views on the nature of woman? In the late nineteenth century, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a physician who also founded the French society for collectors of bookplates and artistic bindings, rebound a 1663 collection of five texts in Latin on virginity and on the diseases of women; looking for ‘a binding appropriate to the subject’, he chose a piece of female human skin, tanned by himself, decorated with gilt on the spine, borders, and cover ornaments.1 For him, skin – the wrapper of the female body – was also the most appropriate container for material on female difference. His decision implied that, even in its skin, the female body differs from that of the male. The Gynaeciorum libri Extracts from two of the works included in this 1663 collection had also featured in versions of an earlier and far more extensive Latin compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on the medical treatment of women, first published in Basle in 1566. Edited by Hans Kaspar Wolf (1532-1601), but conceived by the great humanist scholar Conrad Gesner (1516-64), the full title of this compendium was
1 The book, now held at the Wellcome Library (shelfmark EPB Bindings 14), is I. Sever. Pinaei, De integritatis & corruptionis virginum notis: graviditate item & partu naturali mulierum, opuscula. II. Ludov. Bonacioli, Enneas muliebris. III. Fel. Plateri, De origine partium, earumque in utero conformatione. IV. Petri Gassendi, De septo cordis pervio, observatio. V. Melchioris Sebizii, De notis virginitatis (Amsterdam, 1663). A handwritten note at the front of the title page reads Ce curieux petit livre sur la virginité et les functions génératrices féminines me paraissant mériter une reliure congruente au suject est revêtu d’un morceau de peau de femme tanné par moi-même avec du sumac. The skin came from a woman who died in the hospital in Metz when Bouland was a medical student. For a discussion of the early history of bindings made with human skin, see John Symons,
Gynaeciorum, hoc est, de mulierum tum aliis, tum gravidarum, parientium, et puerperarum affectibus et morbis, libri veterum ac recentiorum2 aliquot, partim nunc primum editi, partim multo quam antea castigatiores; ‘Of matters pertaining to women, that is, concerning both the affections and diseases of pregnant women, those bringing forth and those in labour, and other [conditions] of women, some books of ancient and more recent [authors], partly now edited for the first time, others more carefully revised than before’. Here I will refer to this compendium as the Gynaeciorum libri, the ‘Books on [the diseases of] women’; the Latin gynaecia, like the Greek gynaikeia, has many meanings, extending from ‘women’s matters’ to ‘women’s diseases’, to the female genitalia, and also covers ‘remedies for women’s disorders’.3 A second, enlarged, edition followed in 1586/8 under the editorship of Caspar Bauhin (1560-1624) and a third, running to 1097 folio pages, was produced by Israel Spach (1560-1610) in 1597.4 Although the title page to Spach proudly claimed that the work was necessariis IMAGINIBUS exornati, ‘embellished with indispensable illustrations’, it contained very little beside text. The short extract from Felix Platter, which opened the collection from the second edition onwards, had some anatomical illustrations based on Vesalius, while instruments were shown in Ruf, Paré and Albucasis, and Ruf’s text also included fifteen foetal positions. Other than the full-page illustration of the ‘stone infant’ of Sens, which will be discussed in detail in chapter 3, this was the extent of the images used in the collection. Far from being an accessible work on the nature of the female, this was a confusing and intellectually challenging volume. Both the later editions of the Gynaeciorum libri stated in their titles the multiple origin of the works included – Greek, Latin and Arabic – here using not only the term Arabori (1597) but also, as a synonym, the derogatory Barbari (1586).5 In Greek, the collection included from its first edition the text of the sixth-century writer Muscio translated into Greek from what was believed to be its original
2 Ian Maclean, ‘The Diffusion of Learned Medicine in the Sixteenth Century through the Printed Book’, in Wouter Bracke and Herwig Deumens (eds), Medical Latin from the Late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century (Brussels, 2000), p. 105, points out that ‘recentior’ could at this time mean any writer after 1300.
