Cancer and the Gendered Body - Ravenous Natures

Breeding a tumour: cancer and woman person pathology

That women were to a greater extent than probable than men to endure from cancerous illness was a commonplace inwards early on modern medical as well as pop understandings of the malady. Exactly why this should live the case, however, remains to live explored, as well as I debate that women’s susceptibility to cancers was explained inwards price of their sex-specific pathology, as well as inwards particular, their peculiar anatomy.


The uterus, the woman person breasts as well as the connexion betwixt them provided a fertile environs for cancers to grow, flourish as well as fifty-fifty mimic that most paradigmatically woman person of bodily states, pregnancy.Arguably the driver behind all ‘feminine’ cancers, equally good equally a host of other female-specific disorders, was ane mysterious as well as much-discussed organ, the womb. Fundamental to generation, as well as remaining ‘secret’ inside the body, the womb, equally Katherine Park asserts, ‘appeared equally a – arguably the – privileged object of dissection inwards medical images as well as texts’.Matthew Cobb as well as Monica Green likewise detect that unlocking the secrets of the woman person reproductive organization seemed for early on modern anatomists as well as medical practitioners a for sure road to agreement the mysteries of generation to a greater extent than generally.While they were consistently fascinated past this organ, however, medical texts too reflected cultural ambivalence almost the condition of the womb, as well as inwards item ane of its primary functions, menstruation.


On ane hand, it was widely accepted that, equally Stolberg points out, menstruum provided a organization past which excess humours, gathered inwards the womb, could live expelled from the body, hence preventing illness.Haemorrhoidal haemorrhage inwards men was usually viewed equally an faux of that process, equally were periodic nosebleeds.On the other hand, however, most medical practitioners believed that women alone required such a organization because of the lack of perfecting oestrus inwards their bodies, which was inadequate for the total concoction or perfection of the blood.In Stolberg’s words, ‘[T]he demand for menstruation, non the evacuation itself, was pathological’.

While menstruum mightiness live a salubrious process, menstrual blood was sometimes – specially prior to the seventeenth century – viewed equally excremental as well as noxious, to the betoken that for sure medical writers believed the proximity of a menstruating adult woman could kill plants, sour milk as well as campaign infants to get sick.Furthermore, throughout the early on modern period, the womb was usually viewed equally an unreliable organ, prone to dysfunctions which threatened non alone the woman, but her unborn children, her house unit as well as lodge at large.


The price inwards which these dysfunctions were presented were oft lurid, explicitly depicting the womb equally a negative, though necessary, factor of the feminine body, which was partly independent of the adult woman inwards whom it ‘resided’. In 1636, for example, John Sadler wrote inwards The Sick Woman’s Private Looking-Glasse – purportedly aimed at a woman person audience – that ‘from the wombe comes convulsions, epilepsies, apoplexies, palseyes, hecticke fevers, dropsies, malignant ulcers, as well as to live short, at that topographic point is no illness as well as so sick but may procede from the evill lineament of it’.Still to a greater extent than dramatically, a translated piece of employment past the French medico Jean Riolan, printed inwards 1657, insisted that.

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