"The Purity of Truth": Nineteenth-Century American Women Physicians Write about Delicate Topics

This article examines the strategies nineteenth-century American women physicians used to maintain a respectable ethos when writing about human sexuality and reproduction. In order to make these topics appropriate for women, women physicians strove to alter the connotations surrounding sex, insisting that readers view it from a scientific, socially conscious, pure standpoint. The popularity of these texts suggests that women were active in shaping the scientific and social discourse surrounding "delicate" subjects.