Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Towards Gynaecology -- The Gynaeciorum libri -- The significance of gynaecology -- Authority over the womb -- A 'century of change'? -- 1 Prefacing Women: Owners and Users -- Prefacing women -- Owners and annotators -- Treating menstrual disorders -- Sterility and the uterine mole -- 2 Medical History and Obstetric Practice in William Smellie -- Smellie vs Burton: haste, error and rivalry -- The making of a man-midwife -- Smellie and midwives -- The laboratory of lying-in -- Training men-midwives -- Looking to the past -- Using Hippocrates -- Smellie's sources -- 3 Guilty of 'Male-practice'? Burton's Attack on Smellie -- Disputes in action -- Languages -- The lithopedion of Sens -- The case of the ass's urine -- To cut or not to cut? -- Beyond the wicker woman -- The 'noble instrument' -- Avicenna -- Albucasis -- Ancient instruments -- 4 Delighting in a 'Bit of Antiquity': Sir James Young Simpson -- Collecting the past -- Defining gynaecology -- Simpson and the classics -- Performing the part both of man and woman: Simpson and gender -- Those most bitter pains: justifying chloroform -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary
The Gynaeciorum libri, a compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on gynaecology, is the inspiration for this exploration of the origins of a subfield of medicine. While examining the origins of the compendium, Helen King here concentrates on its reception, looking at a range of different uses of the book in the history of medicine
