Barbara Duden's The Women Beneath the Skin
analyzes "the complaints and wishes of female patients that a doctor in a small German town published in 1730" (Mol, 26)
"Duden delves into the descriptions in her eighteenth-century material to come out with a lived body--but one that lives a life different from our own"
"from what we read, it seems inescapable that the bodies of these women were different from those that we inhabit now [...] We simply couldn't do such a body any more, nor describe it from the inside"
"Duden makes her readers feel that the experience of one's own physicality from the inside does not precede culture" (Mol, 25)
"even the lived experience of one's own body is mediated" (26)
"the flesh is stubborn. It is stubborn as long as it is alive, but even so it is a historical phenomenon. And its historicity is not a mere matter of interpretations changing, but of the very fleshiness of being alive itself [...] It is not just that any form can be plastered into it. But neither is it the case that the modern Western body preceded medicine--subsequently to be objectified by it. They both have a history."