If you haven’t heard me say it a million times already, I’m a podcast fan. There’s always something playing in my ear while I’m preparing dinner. History is my go-to topic, especially when the focus is on women. When I found an episode on Vulgar History podcast titled Author Interview: Helen King (Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts), I was all in.

I listened to the episode two or three times and bought the book. What follows comes from the book flap.

“In Immaculate Forms, classicist and historian Helen King explores the symbiotic relationship between religion and medicine and their twinned history of gatekeeping the key organs that have been used to define “woman,” … The way we understand the body … is still shaped by human intervention and read according to cultural interpretations.” 

These histories, she tells us, explore how “medicine and religion worked together as gatekeepers of bodies.” They shaped our beliefs about gender and sex, and who is good or evil. These stories are being used to support actions and beliefs being promoted in modern times.

To which four body parts does the author refer? Breasts, clitoris, hymen and womb. King conveys deeply researched facts drawn from medicine, religion, and art histories—and does so in a way that is bops along in a narrative that doesn’t become overly heavy.

No matter which direction I turned to, a past-to-present link, or a revelatory fact that left me gobsmacked, frustrated, or indignant on behalf of women who came before us.

There are so many fascinating facts and findings I could share. (I was underlining and circling through my entire read!) But I’ll share a standouts, categorized of course, under King’s four parts.

Breasts:

As far back as Egyptian days, wet nurses were hired to nurse children. Contracts were signed and included a code of conduct to ensure that her milk was not tainted. For example, during the term of service the wet nurse may be prohibited from having sex, becoming pregnant, or nursing another child. Diet and daily physical activity may also be dictated in the terms.

Breast size flagged sexual experience in medieval Europe and made girls and women the target of unwanted attention. To protect unmarried young women from harassment and assault, their breasts were constrained and treated with vinegar and herbs.

During the 1700s, small breasts were considered to be sexy. Some women opted not to nurse their babies, or were forbidden to do so by their husbands, in order to preserve their small breast size.

Clitoris:

Credit for ‘discovering’ this part of female anatomy was claimed by Matteo Realdo Colombo of the University of Padua in 1540. He dedicated his find to the Pope. Colombo’s student, Gabriel Falloppio (for whom fallopian tubes are named) contested the claim and insisted that he was the true discoverer.

 In the early 1900s, a British lord asked during a court trial if Clitoris was the name of a Greek chap. The trial was addressing a fear of “unbridled female sexuality” that may result if privileged medical information about the body became public. (A woman’s morality was questionable if she knew anything about her anatomy.)

Women’s agency in seeking sexual pleasure, especially through self stimulation, was unacceptable. A French surgeon in 1839 stated that clitoridectomy was “so simple, so completely free of any danger, that it is necessary.” In England, clitoridectomies were performed to cure a number of ailments like hysteria, fits, piles, and cancer.

Hymen:

Women’s virginity has historically been important because men required their virginity for the purposes of “property and inheritance transactions” conducted relative to marriage.

When defloweration mania spread across Britain, so did “counterfeit maidenheads”. (Where there’s will, there’s a way!) The obsession with blood at time of intercourse turned sex into a violent anxiety-inducing business for women.

The rape of young girls increased in 18^th century England and early 20^th century Scotland because it was rumoured that intercourse with a virgin would cure venereal diseases.

Womb:

The origin of all women’s diseases was the womb, according to fourth-century-BCE Hippocratic treatises. It was believed to migrate to different areas of the body. “If [the womb] goes up in and turns around and causes a blockage…the womb causes pain in the hips and the head.” Expose a woman to sweet smells, and the womb will return to its appropriate position.

An eighteenth-century Dutch gynecologist wrote that women on their periods gave off “menstrual toxins” that prevented jam from setting and bread from rising.

Hysteria is Greek for womb. Many illnesses such as suffocation of the womb or hypochondria were categorized under hysteria by the close of the 18^th century. After the French Revolution, some aristocrats begged for hysteria diagnoses so they could be admitted to nursing homes, thereby avoiding the guillotine.

For a broad sweep of the Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts, I highly recommend listening to the podcast episode I mentioned earlier. But if you want to really dig in, pick up the book. It’s so darned interesting!