Depleted Men, Emotional Women: Gender and Medicine in the Ming Dynasty

In her new book Vernacular Bodies, Mary Fissell asks questions broadly relevant for the history of women, gender, and medicine anywhere. How did ordinary people understand the female body in early modern England, and what are the broader implications of changes in their understanding? She used vernacular sources—ballads, jokes, images, pamphlets, broadsides, and popular medical manuals—instead of elite medical treatises to demonstrate how women’s bodies had became a cultural site for the articulation and discussion of historical changes, specifically the Protestant Reformation and the English Civil War.1 Changes in the meanings of women’s bodies did not just reflect historic moments, but rather these interpretations of female bodies were the way ordinary people made meaning of and worked out the crises in gender relations integral to both periods.2 The “world turned upside down” during the English Civil War, for instance,