The pandemic has prompted a proliferation of newspaper articles, think-pieces, and other public writing on the history of medicine. Some […]
A Historic Intersex Awareness Day
This year’s Intersex Awareness Day, October 26, marked a historic pivot. A few days before, Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that […]
Amor Vincit Omnia
On June 23, 2016, I flew to London with my husband after a research trip in Germany. There were storms […]
Fictional Detectives and Real-Life Forensic Science
On April 10, 1935, Lord Hugh Montague Trenchard, the Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, invited policemen and politicians to celebrate […]
Emigration as Epidemic: Perspectives on the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Highlands
In our digital age, the contagion metaphor is often part of the language we use regarding the exchange of information. […]
The How and Why of Indigenous Nurse History
How do you write a history of Indigenous nurses? Several stories coincide: stories about education, about colonialism in health care, […]
Clio Reads: Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment
By Carrie Adkins
Many Americans think of female circumcision and clitoridectomy as cultural or religious practices that have taken place primarily in other parts of the world — not as medical procedures performed by doctors in the United States for the past 150 years. And though scholars of gender, sex, and medicine have noted the significance of clitoral surgeries, we have been missing a historical monograph on the subject.[1] Sarah B. Rodriguez’s new book, Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment, fills this gap in the scholarship and, more importantly, explores the relationships between clitoral surgeries, social prescriptions for female behavior, and cultural approaches to sexuality and marriage. It’s an important book, and many Nursing Clio readers will find it fascinating.
