Sennert writes that a woman's body can be "wanting" in three different ways, "seed", blood, and womb. With multiple ways to be wanting, it is implied that the female body is prone to defectiveness and likely to be responsible for any difficulty to conceiving.

Here in the description of the penis, it is presented as a core part of the male sex's infidelity and immoral behaviour, possibly responsible for it. To quote Hobby, she presents the penis as “unpredictable in its behavior and prone to illness, dominating men’s lives in a manner that implicitly parallels the supposed impact of ‘hysteria’ [on women].”13

Sharp makes the penis, moved by imagination, spirits, and wind, seem like it has a life of its own, compounding its aforementioned "unpredictability".

As before, Sharp uses less impressive more negative words like sinewy and hollow to describe the penis. This is both a response to Sennert, and to other male authors who would describe the penis with powerful, “masculine” words like “muscly” and “strong”.14

Sharp also notably compares the testicles to women's breasts, an even stronger example of what Bicks calls the standardizing of the female body. She writes that Sharp “imagines the female body as the standard to which men's witnesses of virility must assimilate” by placing the male anatomy in female terms.12

Seemingly in retaliation, Sharp describes the scrotum as diseased, and with a series of demeaning, weak-sounding words. Bicks writes that Sharp uses her description of the scrotum to “directly respond to men like Daniel Sennert” and his description of the ovaries, and that Sharp turns it into a “shaky and fragile container reminiscent of the leaky early modern female bodies” in other male-authored texts.11

Sennert’s opinion of, and is his language for describing the ovaries is distinctly negative. Not even bothering to describe the ovaries or how they work, or even to address specific afflictions they can have, he paints them broadly as sickly and unreliable and makes them seem gruesome.

The rest of Sharp’s chapter on Caesareans is almost an exact copy of Sennert’s, making the difference even clearer upon inspection.

“Peritoneum” is notable as one of the few complex, Greek-originated words that Sharp uses, seemingly disproving the usual rule that states “[w]hen female midwives attacked their male rivals, at the heart of their disagreement lay the classical languages that formed the basis of men’s education.”10 But she actually proves her own rule by explaining the unfamiliar term earlier in the text, calling it “the Fundament and the share-hone, and the place between both Arteries”. Sennert does not define the word in his text.

Elaine Hobby writes that the “clearest indicator of Sharp’s attitude to the labouring woman lies, though, in her categorical insistence that Caesarean section never be used ‘whilest the Mother is alive’.“9 While the two chapters are obviously similar, what sets them apart is Sharp’s condemnation of the practice and her specific instructions to only perform it if the mother is dead, where Sennert cautions, but reassures of the procedure’s safety.

He demonstrates a willingness to do it in the case of a dead child, but with the mother still alive. Hobby writes that he “leaves open to debate the question of whether to try to save the baby in this way”, that Sharp is right that it would kill the mother at the time, and that Sennert is not the only male author to leave the debate unresolved.7

Not only does Sennert continue to claim Cesareans are safe, and relying on another source rather than experience like other writers, he instructs the reader to learn how to perform them and where to look. His omission of his own degree of experience is notable, as not only does does Sharp reference her own, but the translator of this very work, Nicholas Culpeper, “even omits altogether a description of birth from his manual, explaining that he had never attended a delivery”, according to Hobby.8

He specifically argues for Caesareans rather than against them, refuting existing wisdom and claiming that Cesareans are viable because it is possible for the child to survive.

Sennert firmly establishes up front that C-Sections can be/are done on living women, something Sharp is more against. This could be from a belief that it was survivable (which Sharp denies) due to lack of experience, another male-authored manual from the seventeenth century “records the use of Caesarean section on live women by various surgeons, all with fatal results”, or simply from less regard for women’s lives.6

The greater detail into which Sharp delves while explaining conception and menstruation is typical of her text. Crawford writes that “male writers, when addressing women, were conscious of the need to protect female modesty” but that Sharp “explained the process of generation so that women could understand how healthy babies could be conceived, nurtured in the womb, and reared through infancy and childhood.”5

Both writers use courses, ‘terms’, and ‘menstruous blood’. The word ‘menstruous’ was popularly believed to have come from the same root as ‘monstrous’, but Sharp actually “refutes the standard false etymology” elsewhere in the text, writes Hobby. “Women are not monstrous, Sharp insists; on the contrary, ‘it is a Monstrous thing, that no creature but a women [sic] have them’”.4

She mentions Hippocrates, but to critique, or at least clarify his writing for less classically educated readers, rather than just as a trusted source of information, as opposed to Sennert’s direct and unquestioning reliance on the author.

Sharp claims that the only things without humanity’s distinct two-sexed anatomy are imperfect and wrong, implying that women and their bodies are not inferior, or just a different form of men, but something that is “right”. Bicks writes that many of Sharp’s choices are in service of “standardizing the female body” where it has been demonized.3

Sharp begins by addressing a myth (in the sense of a misconception) and refuting it with simple scientific proof from her own experiences. Specifically a myth perpetuated by other writers, who have been male, which they believed due to lack of experience with the female body.

She invokes a myth, (in the sense of a legend) but uses it more as an example of something that is not true. Sharp often peppers the text with both anecdotes and legends, presumably for the same reason as her deliberate word choices, to make it easier to read for uneducated readers in a time of increasing literacy. According to Keller, “Doreen Evenden has demonstrated the existence of an elaborate apprenticeship system in London that would have obviated the need for instructional books altogether; considering published material nearly irrelevant for her purposes.”2 These books were a commercial enterprise, and Sharp wisely writes hers with that in mind.

He uses the word “Coema” to refer to something like an embryo or fetus. Sharp does not use the term. (I can not find any information on its origin, or indeed any information about the term. I tried Omni, historical dictionaries, medical dictionaries, Latin, Greek, nothing.) Sharp likely avoids the term intentionally, as she does most latinate words. Hobby writes that “she omits ‘hard names’, that is, most of the Latin and Greek terms usually found in midwifery manuals, and writes ‘as briefly and plainly as [she] can’“ in order to make the vernacular language of the text more accessible to non-academic readers.1

Sennert cites Hippocrates and Aristotle directly for information, rather than drawing from personal evidence. He provides little evidence of anything, in fact, whereas Sharp will dispel myths and dispute the explanations provided by Classical authors.