Pope, Homer and manliness: some aspects of eighteenth-century classical learning

with which the debate turned towards the reliability of the witnesses and the social consequences of accepting their statements. As the witnesses were predominantly women (sometimes poor women), the supposedly scientific accounts degenerated into arguments as to whether supporting or gainsaying the testimony in question would help or hinder the maintenance of patriarchy and hierarchy. Virtually all the medical experts (even the Mesmerists) believed that women should be kept in a subordinate position. Only the doctors who supported the possibilities of late births, notably the Paris physician, Antoine Petit, showed any sympathy for the reliability of female intelligence, and, significantly, Petit, a bachelor renowned for his charm, was to be accused by his colleagues of professional impropriety. Assessing the value of Lindsay Wilson's work is very difficult, for, despite the title, it is not just a study of female diseases or even quasi-female diseases (i.e. pregnancy). In fact, the book ranges over a variety of topics, such as the emergence of medical jurisprudence and the professionalization of science, in which the activities of women tout court, not just their diseases, seem to have informed specific male-determined eighteenth-century developments. Moreover, only one (predominantly) female disease is actually examined: convulsions. Not only do the chapters on Saint-Medard and Mesmer deal with women subject to fits, but a separate penultimate chapter looks at the medical discussion of convulsions over the century. On the other hand, there is much in the book that historians of medicine will find stimulating. It has become customary (with the work of Toby Gelfand in particular) to see the eighteenth-century Paris surgeons and physicians on different sides, the former representatives of modernity, the latter of tradition. Wilson demonstrates that this is a false dichotomy when attention is focused, not on the two groups' relative spheres of influence within the medical marketplace, but on the way the marketplace was to be policed. Physicians and surgeons joined together to support or oppose patient (especially female patient) power, just as they joined together to uphold or undermine the hitherto dominant Baconian ethic of science which stressed as its goal the mastery of nature. Similarly, it has become customary (again thanks to Gelfand, and the work of the Annalistes on the Societe Royale de Medecine) to see the medical relationship of the provinces to the capital as one of dependence. Wilson's general chapter on the vapours (based primarily on study in the Society's …