I examined more than 150 anatomy texts (published between 1859 and 1981) and more than 100 gynecology texts (published between 1870 and 1981) for their representations of the clitoris. All of the texts I examined are listed below. I found the anatomy texts at three major medical school libraries, the Galter Health Sciences Library at Northwestern University, the John Crerar Library at the University of Chicago, and the Ebling Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and I found the gynecology texts in the medical libraries at Northwestern and the University of Chicago. I purposely looked at the books on the shelves of major medical school libraries under the assumption they were thus fairly standard. In addition to the books I found at these three libraries, I looked at two specifically about female genital anatomy at the Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School: Netter, Major Anatomy of the Female Genital Tract; and Smout and Jacoby, Gynaecological and Obstetrical Anatomy. I obtained photocopies of Furneaux, Philips’ Anatomical Model of the Female Human Body; and Giles, Anatomy and Physiology of the Female Generative Organs and of Pregnancy (1910) from the University of California, San Francisco, Archives and Special Collections. I examined only anatomy and gynecology texts written in English and published either in the United States or Great Britain.

Not all the gynecology texts had entries for the clitoris; for example, Bender's 1909 Medical Gynecology did not list the clitoris in the index. Another book mentioned the clitoris but only regarding the pathology of carcinoma, considered “unusual” in this organ. What I quickly discovered was that specific texts—texts on surgery, texts on specific diseases like tuberculosis or cancer, and texts principally dealing with topics such as menstruation or childbirth—often did not mention the clitoris. For this reason, I examined only general gynecology texts (though as the twentieth century progressed, gynecology texts increasingly combined with obstetric texts as these two specialties merged).

As I note in my introduction, not all physicians would have agreed with these texts, and there was then (as today) a difference between textbook-recommended practice and actual clinical practice, so I am using these texts as a proxy for medical understanding of the clitoris during this time.