Body Failure: Medical Views of Women, 1900–1950. By Wendy Mitchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. xii plus 414 pp.)

Abstract

In Body Failure: Medical Views of Women, 1900–1950, Wendy Mitchinson examines physicians' attitudes towards women across the female life cycle, from puberty through menopause, in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on medical records, professional journals, medical textbooks, popular literature, and interviews, she argues that the medicalization of women's bodies was deeply influenced by doctors' own belief about women's place in society. In turn, medical attitudes towards women reinforced social ideals. Like the majority of Canadians during this period, physicians considered women's primary role to be that of mother and viewed women as biological destined for this role. Although Mitchinson identifies numerous changes in diagnosis and treatment during this period, she highlights physicians' continued perception of women's bodies as inferior to men's, as closer to nature because of their reproductive capabilities, and as unpredictable and irregular. Each of the eleven chapters in this book explores medical views and treatment of a medical issue or event in the female lifecycle. Mitchinson extends her analysis to include gynecology, reproductive cancers, and mental illness as well as issues related to sexuality and marriage. In doing so, she reveals the extent to which doctors declared themselves experts on the female body broadly defined, as well as the extent to which physicians understood women's mental and physical issues as related to their reproductive capabilities.