Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank Page A

shouldn't have. For want of further vaginal stimulation, women who underwent speculum exams—or so argued Carter and some of his colleagues—would begin engaging in the ruinous "solitary vice" of masturbation and perhaps even turn to prostitution. Such fears of uncontrollable transformations set in motion by the use of medical technology, very like the upright Dr. Jekyll's transformation via drug into the murderous Mr. Hyde, were both a fear and a fantasy in a nineteenth century in which genuinely scientific medical practice was just beginning to gain ground.
    Both the bodies and chastity of women and the nature and intentions of medical men were at stake in the speculum controversy. Medical examination of women's bodies by men has always been at least somewhat controversial, and particularly so in cases involving virgins. As far back as St. Augustine we can find cautionary tales of virgins whose virginities are accidentally "ruined" by clumsy midwives or physicians. The male gynecological specialist's motivations were suspect because they constituted male intrusion not just into women's bodies, but into a historically all-female realm. For most of recorded history, the treatment of women's sexual and reproductive health was the almost exclusive bailiwick of women, including the "juries of matrons" who performed the genital examinations required in the evaluation of rape and annulment cases and who were among the rare women considered qualified to give testimony in medieval courts of law. Women served as respected and acknowledged medical professionals for other women in evaluating fertility and treating infertility, coping with pregnancy and its complications, delivering babies, and of course in evaluating virginity.
    It was not until around 1625 that a term even existed to identify men professionally interested in the health of women and babies. Until the twentieth century, "men-midwives" were often held in disrespect by both women and by other physicians. By crossing over into what had for so long been women's turf, men-midwives crossed not only traditional lines of propriety but also boundaries of class, because midwifery and all it entailed was women's work, a dirty, low trade that could be performed even by those who had not the benefit of a proper, manly Latin education. It was not infrequently presumed that the only interest a man could possibly have in matters gynecological was of the prurient sort. Gynecologists went out of their way to avoid such allegations, frequently conducting examinations by touch alone, perhaps with the patient curtained off by bedsheets, in order to avoid giving the impression of impropriety. It was also not uncommon for doctors conducting gynecological exams to perform palpations of the uterus and ovaries by inserting a finger or fingers into the rectum rather than the vagina, as that was considered less potentially erotic and did not present the problem of possibly damaging the hymen in unmarried women. Men-midwives literally could not afford to be suspected of what was archly termed " * scientific' rascaldom."
    As if this did not already form a sufficiently polarized background for trying to introduce the speculum into gynecological practice, the speculum itself had acquired an aura of guilt by association. In her book The Science of Woman, historian Ornella Moscucci describes how the age-old medical instrument became tainted, in the early nineteenth century, by a relationship with prostitution, the police, and venereal disease. Speculum exam became routine in France in the wake of the 1810 legalization and regulation of prostitution. New laws required each prostitute who registered to practice her trade to submit to a speculum exam to be checked for evidence of venereal disease. Because these exams were performed in a public health context, by physicians in the public employ, upon "public women," trainee physicians from all over Europe and the British Isles, as well as the United