Prudish Tudor textbooks left much to the imagination
Tudor doctors knew little about treating women because they were prudish about female genitals, researchers have claimed.
A 16th-century anatomy book, Compediosa Totius Anatomie Delineatio, by Thomas Gemini, suggests that medics may have censored diagrams of the female body. The book, which goes on display tomorrow at St John’s College at the University of Cambridge, features a depiction of a semi-dissected female torso, but its original owner has cut away a triangle of paper on which the vagina would have been drawn.
Curator Shelley Hughes said it may explain why knowledge of the female anatomy lagged behind that of the body as a whole. “Perhaps Christian Europe would have to overcome its shame over female reproductive organs in order to discover more about their structure.”