Abstract

JORGE RIVERA, Juan Carlos. Medical Lessons on sexual variation: The 16th Century hermaphrodite and intersexuals in the 21st Century. Cuicuilco [online]. 2011, vol.18, n.52, pp.251-272. ISSN 0185-1659.

This paper documents, in Latin and Spanish, the text of the anatomic research carried out by the Italian physician Realdo Colombo [1515 (?) -1559] on sexual variants as published in his magnum opus De re anatomica (LIBER XV, On those things which rarely occur in nature). The use of categories by Colombo to document each case is contrasted with the proposal of The Chicago Consensus to re-classify sexual variants in the 21st Century. These two moments in history are used to establish the changes in the conceptualization and categorization of sexual variants according to their scientific frameworks; anatomy versus the molecular genetics of human embryology. The paper concludes that medical reasoning has defined bodies by the category of "sex" since the birth of modernity.

Keywords : hermaphroditism; intersexuality; anatomy; genitalia; gender; 16th century medicine.

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