Women and Anatomy Education in Enlightenment France

Abstract This article examines the gap between the aspirational goals of eighteenth-century anatomy as a discipline meant to enfranchise women and the complex realities of their engagement with the subject, which elicited both admiration and fear. New materials in medical education, such as wax models and real skeletons, were perceived as both liberating tools and sources of moral anxiety. Women's interactions with these models and the anatomical knowledge they represented were often accepted and even celebrated when presented in an amateur context and under expert supervision. However, they were seen as troubling when consumed independently or in subversive settings. This tension culminated in a late-century backlash against mixed-gender visits to anatomical waxwork museums.