Feminine subjects : girls, medicine and body culture in nineteenth-century France

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, young women and girls were increasingly to become subjects of popular medicine and professional academic research in the medical and human sciences.

They were the subjects of sexual abuse cases, psychological experiments, medical clairvoyance studies and investigations into the perils of puberty, and these studies contributed to a broad range of fields in the medical sciences.

How can we reconstruct their cases and what were the consequences of involving them in scientific research?

Were girls complicit in this scientific activity? And to what extent were the subjects also victims?