The Woman beneath the Skin

“While modern readers may be initially alienated by the way in which phenomena cited in Duden’s profuse quotations from [Dr. Johannes Pelargius] 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

“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