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- Title
When it Hurts to Look: Interpreting the Interior of the Victorian Woman.
- Authors
Yeniyurt, Kathryn
- Abstract
The use of the vaginal speculum was as important to Victorian doctors who struggled to professionalise the fields of gynaecology and obstetrics as it was controversial, especially when such doctors were men attending to women of respectable class status. While the debate over the use of the speculum in Victorian Britain was certainly rooted in moral concerns over the exposure of women's bodies, an examination of the arguments made by Victorian medical men concerning the use of the instrument reveals that there was more than just modesty at stake. This article will consider how the nineteenth-century texts that articulate different positions regarding the use of the speculum in gynaecological examinations also demonstrate important tensions relating to the privileging of the sense of sight versus touch in Victorian medicine, particularly when referring to the respective utility and purpose of a male doctor's visual or tactile knowledge of the inside of a woman's body.
- Subjects
SPECULUM (Medicine); GYNECOLOGY; HISTORY of ethics; OBSTETRICS -- History; OBSTETRICS apparatus &; instruments; HISTORY of medicine; WOMEN'S health services; VICTORIAN Period, Great Britain, 1837-1901; HISTORY
- Publication
Social History of Medicine, 2014, Vol 27, Issue 1, p22
- ISSN
0951-631X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/shm/hkt046