Medicalizing Difference: The Eighteenth-Century Construction of the "Hermaphrodite"

(Hardback)

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Exploring 18th-century medicines construction of individuals with non-standard sexual anatomy as hermaphrodites, this book focuses on the genre of the case history from three different languages and national contextsBritish, French, and German. Medicalizing Difference examines case studies written about Anne Grandjean, Michel Anne Drouart, Maria Dorothea Derrier, and an unnamed Angolan hermaphrodite. Multiple case studies were published about each of these individuals and are discussed throughout the book's four chapters, each of which focuses on one momentous epistemological shift in the eighteenth-century: an increasing focus on empiricism and the related professionalization of medicine, the expanding market for popular scientific literature, changing notions about generation and reproduction, and the exploration of foreign territories. This book reads these case histories against the grain and historicizes 18th-century medicines construction of the category of the hermaphrodite, demonstrating that, rather than describing a fact, these histories created their subject of study

Author Bio

Stephanie M. Hilger is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.