This topic explores how western doctors (usually male) have thought about, represented and treated women’s bodies. Medical accounts of women became the authoritative view on women's bodies and during the eighteenth century, western medicine became based on anatomy. Dissection, together with anatomical models and illustrations, played a central role. Anatomical knowledge was the basis for surgery on women and new ways of managing childbirth. The ‘medicalisation’ of women continued unchecked until the second half of the twentieth century, when challenged by feminists. Medical theory and practice is always shaped by, and shapes, the wider culture. What male doctors saw in female bodies often depended on existing social relations, and served to reinforce them.