Medical Advice for Women is a new five-volume collection from Routledge and Edition Synapse covering professional, scientific, and medical opinion, in addition to the popular guides aimed at the female reader, between the years 1830–1915.
Medical literature from this period provides a fascinating insight into the interrelations between social proscriptions, often validated by appeals to religious authority, and medical prescriptions. The narrative contained within this largely chronological collection is not necessarily a progressive one from quackery to medical and scientific enlightenment; the situation was more nuanced than selective quotation from sensational examples has implied in the past. This collection, edited and with a new introduction by Ruth Robbins, illuminates the complexity and shifting grounds of opinion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by bringing back into print a broad selection of texts offering medical advice to women, and will be of interest to all scholars and students working in gender and cultural studies, and particularly to historians and sociologists of medicine.