Medicalizing Difference

Exploring 18th-century medicine’s construction of individuals with non-standard sexual anatomy as “hermaphrodites”, this book draws on insights from gender, critical race, and disability studies.

Exploring 18th-century medicine’s 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 contexts—British, 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 medicine’s construction of the category of the “hermaphrodite”, demonstrating that, rather than describing a fact, these histories created their subject of study