The Nature of Their Bodies: Women and Their Doctors in Victorian Canada

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

In this detailed, carefully researched social history, the author
explores the theory that medicine and culture go hand in hand, and one
way of discovering attitudes toward women is to examine their medical
experiences.

Mitchinson gives numerous pieces of evidence to support the view that
the Victorian medical profession considered women’s dominant
characteristic to be the reproductive system. This belief was so strong
that it was seen as determining women’s social role, moral status, and
physical and mental health. Victorian physicians did not hesitate to
speak out on subjects as diverse as bicycle riding, fashions, and
reading novels, as just about everything a woman did was viewed in terms
of a possible effect on the reproduction system. “Excitable reading”
was said to cause “general debility”; bicycle riding had “evil
effects on the uterus”; corsets compressed the womb.

Some Victorian doctors prescribed marriage as treatment for everything
from “mania” to underdeveloped ovaries. Celibacy, they thought,
caused ill health in women because it meant denying what they were
designed to do: bear children. Young women, they thought, needed so much
energy for the formation of their reproductive system that they had no
surplus energy for education. “Brain work,” it was thought, would
destroy “feminine capabilities.”

The work discusses at length the Victorian view of the “three
mysteries” (puberty, menstruation and menopause), abortion, birth
control, sexuality, the development and evolution of obstetrics and
gynecology as medical specializations, and women’s mental health
problems.

Although the book is scholarly in its structure and comes with all the
references and notes expected in an academic research project, it is
quite readable. Anyone with an interest in women’s role in nineteenth
century Canada will find it invaluable.