ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the manner in which male bodies were analysed, controlled, and contested in French medical texts and correspondence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How these ideas were articulated will be explored here through notions of masculinity; that is, how the identification of the man who could hold authority over others depended on socially-defined masculine qualities and characteristics. However, the men who advised in the medical consultations discussed here, physicians and surgeons, were for the most part at the top of their professions, educated and articulate. How elite male patients more generally claimed or retained their status as governing men through their interactions with medical practitioners about their own health. The education and training necessary to become a physician or surgeon was a male prerogative, as is revealed in the correspondence considered here, yet it failed to transform practitioners into figures of unquestioned authority over their patients.