Perilous chastity: women and illness in pre-Enlightenment art and medicine

The sub-title under which this analysis appears is highly misleading. Far from discussing women and illness in preEnlightenment art and medicine, Dixon concentrates almost exclusively on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of sick women. In order to understand these images, in which most commonly a warmly-dressed young woman reclines on a bed or chair, Dixon argues that it is necessary not only to look at the language of gender, symbol and gesture conveyed by other people and objects present in the sick-room, which may suggest an erotic context, but also to investigate medical texts of the period. This is a perfectly reasonable strategy, even without Dixon's analogy between artists and physicians, both of whom study the outward appearance in order to discover the inner state (p. 62). She also looks for parallels between these images and those of contemporary medical advertising, seeing the paintings as advertisements for marriage which warn of the consequences should women fail to conform: "The threat of illness was a way for men to maintain control" (p. 245). The major fault of this book lies in the author's relentless merger of suffocation of the womb, chlorosis, nymphomania, hysteromania, furor uterinus, love sickness, hysteria and many other categories as a single condition, "this ancient disease" (p. 51), a "mysterious universal ailment of many names that has afflicted women throughout history" (p. 240), "labeled variously" (p. 240) but usually referred to here as furor uterinus, or as "hysteria"; this latter identification enables her to produce a misleading Appendix of medical dissertations from 1575 to 1740 on all the above conditions, but here described as "on the subject of female hysteria" (p. 249). She claims that her decision to conflate categories which earlier medical writers were most concerned to distinguish between is a legitimate simplification because there was a single "set of symptoms and associations that connoted a disordered womb" (p. 15). "There can be no doubt that the disorder once existed and was widespread among women" (p. 240). Both the difficulties of this merger, and Dixon's casual use of sources, can be illustrated by her citations of Robert James' Medicinal dictionary (1743-5). It appears as evidence for eighteenth-century concern about the dangers of too much sex (p. 226, n. 25), and features several times as evidence for the seventeenth century (p. 164, p. 177, p. 188), but nowhere does Dixon face the implications of James' own deliberate separation of the categories offuror uterinus, hysteria, hypochondria and chlorosis. Some errors may have slipped in by chance-"corsets, which could reduce the size of a woman's waist to a mere sixteen inches, were introduced in the first half of the sixteenth century and continued to be fashionable through the early 1960s" (p. 240)-but more worrying errors are legion. For example, Dixon states that "Hippocrates was not translated into Arabic" (p. 22); this is completely untrue, and I assume that she meant to say that the majority of Hippocratic gynaecology was not translated into Arabic. She is particularly weak on ancient and medieval medicine. "Since the time of Galen and Hippocrates" (p. 112) conflates around 700 years. On the medical uses of music, she writes that "The ancient Roman physician Soranus had also suggested singing as a remedy for furor uterinus" (p. 178), citing in a footnote Owsei Temkin's translation (Gynaecology, pp. 167-8). Soranus was not Roman, but Greek; in this passage, "vocal exercises" are only one of over twenty suggested ways of strengthening the body during remission in chronic cases of