Reproduction, Gynecology, and Female Anatomy

That Shakespeare Life

In 1616, the year that William Shakespeare died, anatomist Helikiah Crooke published a book of medical diagrams that included a surprisingly high level of detail about human anatomy for a society that didn’t yet have powerful instruments like a microscope. However, noticeably absent from his medical drawings are any anatomically correct terms for the female body. For example, Crooke’s drawings correctly name many parts of the male anatomy, like the epididymis, peritoneum, penis, and the testicles, but when it comes to the female anatomy diagram, even though he has the fallopian tubes correctly drawn in the picture, he labels them as “Spermatical veins.” In another diagram, the uterus is definitely drawn in the shape of a man’s primary sexual organ, only it is labeled as a “womb,” with no mention of the cervix or the vagina. Shakespeare’s plays give us some examples of how this level of medical knowledge was known by general society because in his works Shakespeare uses anatomical terms like ‘urine” as well as “sperm” and even “Nerves and veins”, so we can see that some knowledge of human anatomy was broadly available in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but Helikiah Crooke’s diagrams raises some major questions about not only the medical understanding of women’s bodies, but exactly what kind of medical care was available for women in Shakespeare’s lifetime. In order to explore the 16-17th century understanding of human reproduction, and what the hyper-masculinization of women’s bodies meant for women’s medicine and gynecological care in Shakespeare’s lifetime, we are talking today with Roz Sklar.

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