The Woman Beneath the Skin

A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Barbara Duden

Translated by Thomas Dunlap

    Duden splendidly succeeds in recreating this submerged and secret world of female consciousness, and the ambiguous role of the physician in maintaining it. An important milestone.
       --Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute, London

    While modern readers may be initially alienated by the way in which phenomena cited in Duden's profuse quotations from [Dr. Johannes Pelargiusi] Storch's journals conflict with contemporary 'certainties' about the body...her approach ultimately makes the desired point: the culturally contingent 'boundary that separates the body, and especially the body beneath the skin, from the world around it' likewise conditions contemporary understandings, not only of what is known about our bodies but also about how people in other times and places have 'imagined' their bodies.
       --Patricia Herminghouse, Signs

  • Cover: The Woman Beneath the Skin
  • A photo of the author

Barbara Duden has been on the faculty of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Pennsylvania State University and is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Essen, Germany.