Since Initial Pain May Turn into the Heat of Passion

Discourses of Rape in the Forensic Medicine of the 18th Century

Abstract

On the bases of 18th-century forensic medical reports, the authoress reconstructs the changing medical perspective on rape, juxtaposing it to the perception of the victims in order to trace how different perceptions of sexual violence became engraved in the male and female mind. Medical interpretations of the offence transmitted stereotypes of male and female sexual behaviour in the seemingly objective manner of the natural sciences, and thus turned them into unquestionable facts of nature. The physicians' normative dichotomous image of women as either virgins or harlots predetermined the physicians' reports even before the onset of the physical examination. Attention to the victim's statements was highly selective, and it was mainly the woman's reputation which decided the outcome of her examination. Towards the end of the 18th century a gynaecological legitimation of this social and legal trivialisation of rape becomes discernible. Thus by nature the female body had become ,inscribed' with the sole responsibility for the sexual violence against it.