Abstract
This section introduction explores medical approaches to infertility in a variety of geographical contexts and chronological periods, considering how doctors have conceptualized, diagnosed, and responded to infertility as a condition. The chapters in this section examine the historical shaping of medical understandings of infertility, how access to treatment has been mediated by social, political, and scientific factors, and the medical construction and treatment of ‘deviant’ sexualities. Indeed, it has often proved impossible to separate medical and moral discourses. These chapters also lament an historical failure to record the patient’s voice, and suggest the very limited extent to which patient autonomy was compatible with medical authority. The section thereby offers rich insights into medical thinking and practice on infertility, and into the broad interface between medicine, science, and culture.
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Notes
- 1.
See Janet Browne, ‘Darwin and the Face of Madness’, in William Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, 3 vols (London and New York, 1985), vol. 1; Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989); Bill Luckin, ‘Revisiting the Idea of Degeneration in Urban Britain, 1830–1900’, Urban History, 33:2 (2006).
- 2.
See Mathew Thomson, ‘Sterilisation, Segregation and Community Care’, History of Psychiatry, 3:12 (1992); Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford, 2010).
- 3.
Michael Worboys, ‘Unsexing Gonorrhoea: Bacteriologists, Gynaecologists, and Suffragists in Britain, 1860–1920’, Social History of Medicine, 17:1 (2004).
- 4.
See Lesley Hall, ‘The Sexual Body’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London and New York, 2003); Gayle Davis, ‘Health and Sexuality’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (Oxford, 2011).
- 5.
Ann Oakley, ‘Normal Motherhood: An Exercise in Self-Control’, in Bridget Hutter and Gillian Williams (eds), Controlling Women: The Normal and the Deviant (London, 1981).
- 6.
Sally Sheldon, Beyond Control: Medical Power and Abortion Law (London, 1997), pp. 24–26; Sally Macintyre, ‘The Medical Profession and the 1967 Abortion Act in Britain’, Social Science and Medicine, 7 (1973), p. 130.
- 7.
Sheldon, Beyond Control, p. 168. See also Melanie Latham, Regulating Reproduction: A Century of Conflict in Britain and France (Manchester and New York, 2002); Lesley Hoggart, Feminist Campaigns for Birth Control and Abortion Rights (New York, 2003).
- 8.
See Anne Digby, ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’, in Susan Mendes and Jane Rendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York, 1989); Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke and New York, 2004).
- 9.
See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London, 1985); Digby, ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’.
- 10.
Marland, Dangerous Motherhood.
- 11.
Marcia Inhorn and Pasquale Patrizio, ‘Rethinking Reproductive “Tourism” as Reproductive “Exile”’, Fertility and Sterility, 92:3 (2009); Christabelle Sethna and Marion Doull, ‘Journeys of Choice?: Abortion, Travel, and Women’s Autonomy’, in Stuart Murray and Dave Holmes (eds), Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics (London and New York, 2009).
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Davis, G., Loughran, T. (2017). Introduction: Situating Infertility in Medicine. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_14
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