Toward the end of the Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote increasing attention to what they called “women’s secrets.”
At the same time, Italian physicians and surgeons began to open human bodies in order to study their functions and the illnesses that afflicted them.
“Secrets of Women” explodes the myth that medieval religious prohibitions hindered the practice of human dissection in medieval and Renaissance Italy, arguing that female bodies, real and imagined, played a central role in the history of anatomy.
