Rene Almeling

Exemplary is Emily Martin’s groundbreaking study of eggs and sperm, in which she analyzed how cultural norms of femininity and masculinity led to beliefs about passive eggs and aggressive sperm.15 She demonstrated how these beliefs influenced not only the questions that biomedical scientists asked in the laboratory but also portrayals of their research in medical textbooks.

To underscore the irreducibility of sex and gender, of biology and society, Anne Fausto-Sterling suggested the metaphor of nesting dolls, which I adapted to illustrate reproduction as a biological and social process.

As a result, the nesting-dolls metaphor allows for a visualization of how biological and social processes may be analytically distinguishable but are actually indissoluble.

To return to the notion of sex as a dualism, this is how and why the combining occurs. The content of one side of the binary has been defined by the content of the other side of the binary.

Together, these studies underscore the theoretical and empirical significance of studying gender and medical knowledge, and not just women or men and medical knowledge. Including both women and men in the same study makes possible a relational analysis of how gender shapes the process of medical knowledge-making. I extend this line of research by flipping the question: how does the relationality of gender shape the making of non-knowledge?

Ornella Moscucci argues that, before 1800, women’s diseases were not seen as the province of any one group of medical practitioners.17 That started to change in midcentury, when clinicians began to argue that women’s reproductive functions dominated their physiology and psychology.

The twin assumptions that women and men were profoundly different and that women’s pathologies derived from her unique biology both defined and legitimized the specialty of gynecology.

Venereal disease has mostly been studied by historians of sexuality, while quackery has been the province of historians of medical specialization. And historians of reproduction have mostly focused on women’s bodies, women’s experiences, and women’s specialties, such as gynecology and obstetrics.

We didn’t know how a guy got an erection. So I spent two years of my residency studying sperm and erection.

It was not until the late twentieth century that biomedical researchers began to distinguish between the fertility of sperm and its health. Over the past several decades, there has been a growing realization that some of the same factors that affect sperm count, motility, and morphology—such as a man’s age, behaviors, and exposures—might also be causing damage to the genetic material inside sperm, with implications for children’s health.