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      • HARVEST
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      Windows to the Womb: Visualization, Metaphor and Reproduction in the Early Eighteenth Century and Today

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      Date
      2009
      Author
      Wagner, Darren N.
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Masters
      Metadata
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      Abstract
      My thesis is a historical and cultural study of how the womb was visualized in Britain circa 1660-1775 as well as during the twenty-first century. Prior to the late seventeenth century, the womb was frequently explained as an occult phenomenon, which is to say, as an enigmatic object with inexplicable powers. Because of the social significance and personal investment involved with reproduction, the womb was continually the subject of speculation and conjecture. Additionally, the womb was considered as crucially influencing female well-being, psychology, and sexuality. Following the prerogative of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century empiricism and human science, the womb was increasingly the subject of inquiry, especially as it had been long perceived an occluded phenomenon that had been rarely examined or described visually. The progression of the visualization of the womb during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century incorporated and instituted certain features in the visual illustrations that continue to act as precedents for medical scientific uterine imaging today. Having traced the dissolution and influence of earlier occultist beliefs about the womb, I found that a regular set of metaphors were used in explaining the womb during the eighteenth century. These metaphors provided conceptual themes for the anatomical illustrations of the womb that were contemporaneously produced. One such metaphorical understanding was the brain-womb, wherein the brain and the womb were commonly analogized through both literary tropes and medical pathologies. An overarching concept that directed how the womb was understood was the perception that the womb was an autonomous entity within the female body. This precept allowed that the womb could perform various, often malignant, activities that vitally altered the female constitution. The visual images created for anatomical and medical treatises responded to these metaphors and conceptualizations, responses which markedly altered how the womb, reproduction, and the female body were understood. My final consideration relates these metaphorical and conceptual features of eighteenth-century visualizations of the womb to modern-day uterine imaging. Although optical technology has vastly changed between these two eras, many features and conceptualizations have carried forward, crucially informing how we now perceive the uterus.
      Degree
      Master of Arts (M.A.)
      Department
      Interdisciplinary Studies
      Program
      Interdisciplinary Studies
      Supervisor
      Pierson, Roger; Stephanson, Raymond
      Committee
      Dyck, Erika; Smith, Lisa; Flood, Peter; Muri, Allison
      Copyright Date
      2009
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/etd-08092009-162817
      Subject
      Imaging
      Eighteenth Century
      Obstetrics
      History of Medicine
      Science and Literature
      Uterus
      Womb
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      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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