Women's Health

A number of the prints in the collection deal with women's health, including some vivid depictions of pregnancy. At the beginning of the Meiji era, the bunmei kaika, or "civilization and enlightenment" movement, introduced a more scientific outlook in many areas of Japanese life, including attitudes toward pregnancy and childbirth. Anatomical drawings from the West, available widely for the first time, provided models for the representation of such themes as the stages of fetal gestation.

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