Female Impotence or Obstruction of the Womb? French Doctors Picturing Female Sterility in the 1820s

Review Essay: Infertility in History and the History of Reproduction

“…Early nineteenth-century physicians thought about infertile women through what Sophie Vasset calls a 'loose typology … the lean and hot type, the virago, the melancholy and the morose, and the anxious intellectual', types which 'framed the medical and cultural understanding of a condition that remained invisible and mysterious even for reputed doctors'. 30 These ideas, which Vasset also traces in medical correspondence about an individual French woman's case, were elaborated and authorised by a key reference work, the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1815), which contained two entries addressing sterility: one on physiology and another on legal medicine and pathology. One entry expounded on the physiognomy of female fertility, effectively instructing men on the hunt for a suitable marriage partner that 'her carnation should be beautiful, her flesh gorged with vital sap, her mammary well-formed, she should have good appetite and a jolly temper'.…”