Nowadays, we can hardly imagine a world without hormones. We have to travel in time to find other worlds that are not yet inhabited by them. Imagine a scene on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the late nineteenth century. Ladies are chattering about the exciting events of the past days. If we could eavesdrop on these conversations, we would hear detailed, ultimate accounts of how these women try to cope with daily life. Maybe we are lucky and we can overhear them exchanging experiences about pregnancy and delivery. We will never know precisely which words women used in those days to express themselves, but we know one thing for sure: women did not refer to hormones to explain their lives. Simply because the very word hormones did not exist in the nineteenth century.
Where does the concept of hormones, particularly sex hormones, come from? How did it become included in the medical discourses about the body? What inspired scientists to develop a totally new model for understanding bodies? Obviously, scientists who introduce new concepts into science do not start from scratch. Or to paraphrase Nelson Goodman: “scientific development always starts from worlds already on hand” (Goodman 1978:6). I would like to know which worlds inspired scientists to introduce the concept of sex hormones. As I indicated in the Introduction, Fleck’s concept of prescientific ideas is useful here (Fleck 1979: 23-27). It made me wonder whether the introduction of the concept of sex hormones was linked to any previously existing beliefs about women and men; and if so, how did these prescientific ideas then become integrated into the emerging field of sex endocrinology? Using Fleck’s notion of prescientific ideas, I shall trace which cultural ideas became embodied in the concept of sex hormones and how and to what extent scientists actively transformed these ideas, once they were incorporated in research practice. My strategy is to focus on the different disciplines that became involved in hormone research. Sex endocrinology, like other fields in the life sciences at the turn of the twentieth century, was characterized by two different approaches: a biological approach and a chemical approach (Clarke 1985:390; Kohler 1982). In the early years, the study of sex hormones was dominated by scientists who adopted a biological style: physiologists, gynecologists, anatomists and
zoologists.1 In the 1920s, chemical approaches came to dominate the field.2 I shall examine the extent to which differences in disciplinary styles may account for the transformation of prescientific ideas.
Finally, I shall evaluate the impact of the introduction of the concept of sex hormones on the conceptualization of sex differences. What were the consequences of this new approach in the study of the human body? I describe how sex endocrinology caused a revolutionary change in the study of sex differences and led to a conceptualization of sex that meant a definitive break with prescientific ideas about the female and the male body.