I don't get out into literary territory much

and it shows.  I am currently reading Aït-Touati's Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century (which is already turning out to be wonderful), and the author informs the reader that she will be using, among other things narratology as a tool.  I was totally unaware of its existence as a conceptual tool.  In that, I can seek solace in the fact that MS Word's spell check tool also was unaware of the word, though that is of little comfort.

Although, now that I think back, I feel that perhaps Hayden White might have talked about it in Metahistory, a book which I was assigned to read, but never really did. But, there was stuff about literature in there. Hmmm... irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, or something like that?    And a chart.  And him writing in the ironic mode.  But not in Williamsburg, and possibly not with a mustache. Although there were a lot of words, or that I am quite certain.  That is all I remember from the hour or so I spent skimming the book.  So it is entirely possible that it discussed narratology, or even was about narratology, or even was about tail-chasing piglets on their way to the zoo. All I know is that I am ba bad student, and did not read it with the diligence it was most certainly due.  And yet, I am sill in my program.  Strange, how these things happen.

Review: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Laqueur argues that like sex (much like gender) has been invented and reinvented in response to an age’s particular social and cultural norms, and was not a result of scientific advances.  He argues that over the course of medical history, there had been a shift from the one-sex model, where there was just one sex, and that differences between males and females were differences in degree, and not of kind, to a two-sex model.  The one-sex model was, according to him, surprisingly long-lived because differences between men and women were externally accorded to different sexes, and not thought to be a function of a completely different body.  Also, he argues that sex was linked to power, and man, at that time, was in all aspects really the measure of all things, including bodies, female and otherwise.  The further argues that this was a point corroborated by the great sixteenth and seventeenth century anatomists—their representations of male and female genitalia as simply inverted versions of one another were correct in that they represented what these anatomists thought they saw, because representations are dependent on cultural ideas, and not necessarily on empirical evidence.

Around 1750, he goes on to say, sex was invented.  The one-sex model was transformed into the two-sex model that states that men and women have different bodies and different characteristics that are a direct result of these two fundamentally different types of bodies (though, the one sex model lived on in the cultural imagination up to the present day).  Again, he argues that this change was not due to advances in medical theory, but a result of a changing social, political, and cultural context.  The differentiation (or not) between two sexes was never due to biology or what the status of medicine was at any particular time, but to “the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.”  In the end, he argues, sex is an artifice, and always has been.

The problem, however, is that Lacquer grossly simplifies the matter.  His one-sex model, especially, picks and chooses ideas from various philosophers and medical figures, and in the end, the patchwork he creates samples many, but adequately explains nothing.  His book represents an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that attitudes about a person’s sex have changed over time, and that they have changed as the result of cultural and social factors, rather than strictly scientific ones.  In this, he follows the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but on a more specific level, he argues that, in opposition to Foucault’s idea that one episteme overtook and completely supplanted another, ideas of the one-sex model lived on, even in a two-sex model world.  And it is at the level of this specific argument that the book ends up woefully unconvincing.  Lacquer seemed so intent on adducing evidence for his thesis that he artificially imposes an order on pre-eighteenth century medical thought (that, in itself is problematic—any argument that purports to explain a swath of time from Aristotle to the French Revolution automatically raises red flags) that simply was not there.   The book is provocative, to be sure.  But the argument, woefully, is simply inaccurate.

Andreas Vesalius

I am currently reading (and, for some parts of it, re-reading) O'Malley's biography of the sixteenth century anatomists, Andreas Vesalius (as well as drinking some coffee from the grad lounge coffee machine (it seems to have picked up an interesting.... terroir of grad lounge filthiness, but I have a raging cold, and can't taste anything anyway).  O'Malley really seems to have closed the book on Vesalian studies-- after Roth's earlier biography of the man, this seems to be the only good biography of the dude, and besides his inclusion in every general history of medicine that was ever written, there seems to be a paucity of books dedicated to Vesalius and his work (at least in comparison with, to chose some contemporaneous examples, Nicholas Copernicus or Girolamo Cardano**).  But, at any rate, O'Malley's book is filled with some marvelous details, and it's not like books about Renaissance medicine are in short supply...

Some great quotations/hilarious anecdotes from the book:

• "Some of the dissections were apparently carried out by Vesalius alone, or possibly with certain chosen students, in his own dwellings, upon cadavers from rifled tombs or from executions, and, as he wrote in the Letter on the china root, sometimes kept in his bedroom for several weeks. Unquestionably he was an enthusiast, and just as unquestionably it was best that he had no domestic responsibilities at that time."  I understand that as a new professor, he might have had small digs, and would have trouble finding a place to put extraneous things like cadavers, but I think that leaving them in his bedroom seems a bit… strange.  Enthusiast of what, I sometimes wonder…
• Is Vesalius coming to your town?  Lock up your graveyards and guard your cadavers—whenever he traveled to give lectures in other universities, there was a wave of body-snatching in his wake.  This practice became so widespread that in 1550, the Venetian senate publicly threatened to actually enforce the existing ban against grave robbing. 
• Vesalius, on the capriciousness of artists:  “[No longer] shall I have to put up with the bad temper of artists and sculptors who made me more miserable than did the bodies I was dissecting.” (Letter on the china root).  That is pretty miserable; those bodies must have stunk up to high heaven. 
• The printer of the Fabrica, Joannes Oporinus married poorly, because (according to O’Malley, at least) the lady was “an ill-tempered shrew.”  Editorializing much?  
• Worst name encountered so far: Polycarp.  Polycarp Cratander was the son of Andreas Cratander; the two were in a father-and-son printing getup in Basel. They had decided to give up the business, and they sold all their equipment to Thomas Platter, Balthasar Ruch, Robert Winter, and Oporinus (all of whom were partners in their publishing firm)
• “As the emperor’s [Charles V] far flung empire was the result of inheritance from many sources, so like his physical and mental inheritances were the result of many and various dynastic marriages, of which some might better have been left unconsummated. […] More somber was the emperor’s inheritance from his mother, Joanna of Spain, whose mind, delicately balanced if not always somewhat unbalanced, was finally toppled by the combination of her husband’s long absences and infidelities, and then his early death in 1506.  Presumably Joana was the unlucky heir of her grandmother, a Portuguese princess who died quite mad.”  Royal lineages, so much crazy stuff!
• Oh, Vesalius, you snarky, snarky man!  “I esteem [Jean] Guinter for many reasons, an in my books I call him a teacher of medicine, but I do not consider him an anatomist, and I should willingly suffer him to inflict as many cuts on me as I have seen him attempt on man or any other animal—except at the dinner table.” 

And that's one more book that has been read. It's time to celebrate-- break out the coffee!





** Interesting fact: all three of those men practiced as physicians, although Copernicus never finished his medical degree (he instead got a degree in canon law from Ferrara).

some google book hands

I love Google books. I love it a lot.  In fact, I don't know how anyone ever managed to do research without them.  I also love how mis-scanning there are, but I do sometimes like to see latex-covered finger here and there (so long as it's on the page I absolutely need and cannot find anywhere else).  It makes the whole process seem more human.  I suppose if I saw a robot arm, I would be less impressed, but as someone who has spent too much time scanning books at our library book-scanning station, I appreciate how tedious the work can be.

From Early Venetian Printing Illustrated:
The first is from a hand holding down the sheet with the errata on it, and the page was later scanned in its entirety















They also scanned the obverse of the errata sheet to show that there was nothing on it.  That was nice of them:

The book is free on Google Books, and quite interesting.  Books about books.  Good times.