'To relieve distressed women:' Teaching and establishing the scientific art of man-midwifery or gynecology in Edinburgh and London, 1720-1805

The founding of the University of Edinburgh Medical School as well as the rapid proliferation of medical lecturing in eighteenth-century London dramatically altered both the teaching and practice of medicine in Georgian Britain. Within these new and more experimental arenas for medicine, lecturers in the fledgling science of man-midwifery found a highly receptive audience for their over-arching concept of the female body. Drawing on ideas which had been popularized by the Dutch physician, Hermann Boerhaave, these lecturers plotted the female body in terms of solids and fluids. According to these precepts, women's biological inferiority lay rooted in the female body's inability to process the natural evacuations such as perspiration, blood, chyle and urine.;While the popularity of such individual lecturers as William Hunter, William Smellie and Alexander Hamilton ensured that this view of the female body reached hundreds of medical students, this paradigm found widespread acceptance for a variety of reasons. First, and most importantly, it created a scientific basis for existing cultural beliefs which held that the female body was inferior to its male counterpart. Secondly, by linking superfluous fluids and various diseases, it provided an excellent rationale for the existence of such female disorders as menorrhagia and leucorrhea. Thirdly, it endorsed traditional assumptions regarding the instability of the adolescent and post-menopausal female body. And lastly, the development of clinical training provided students and lecturers with visible and often dramatic evidence for their theories.;Although the midwifery lecturer remained on the periphery of the orthodox medical community, lecture notes, student diaries and private letters indicate that his views were absorbed and disseminated by many of his colleagues in such diverse fields as anatomy and chemistry. Casebooks and medical journals also provide graphic evidence of the man-midwife's growing influence on medical practice in general. And an analysis of this material demonstrates the longevity of many of these theories; echoes of Georgian beliefs and concerns regarding the female body can be found in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century perceptions of the female body.