Sexuality ‘from the Greeks to Freud’, as the subtitle to Thomas Laqueur's 1990 book Making Sex reads, is an expansive subject for any one scholar to tackle. His central claim – of an eighteenth-century watershed between earlier views of male and female genitalia as the same but inverted (one-sex) to modern views of incommensurable difference (two-sex) – has become a core, although often contended, theory in the histories of sex and gender. In The One-Sex Body on Trial, Helen King levels detailed criticism at Laqueur's argument that in the premodern West the genders had the same body with the same, but differently arranged, genitals. The first third of King's book broadly scrutinizes Laqueur's study; the last two-thirds comprise close readings of Phaethousa and Agnodice, two Graeco-Roman case stories with particular relevance to how female sex figured in medical practice and thinking from the classical period to the early modern.

King begins by contemplating the reasons why Making Sex met with such lasting success, including its provocative thesis, arresting visual images and suitability for university teaching. Yet, as King relates, many scholars readily allow that Laqueur's argument about a one-sex/two-sex historical shift is overreached and overstated. His long chronology and interdisciplinary sources left many specialists, unwilling to wade beyond their depth, withholding their criticisms. Keeping prudently close to her expertise in ancient medical history, King gives a full and incisive critique of Laqueur's inaccurate readings, under-referenced images, and source limitations. King's conclusion, having reviewed Laqueur's sources and some of her own, is that a one-sex paradigm was never predominant.

The second part of The One-Sex Body on Trial is an analysis of Phaethousa, a Hippocratic story ‘probably dating to the fourth century BC’ about a mother who, during her husband's absence, suffered masculinizing changes – amenorrhoea followed by hirsutism and dysphonia – and eventually death (p. 19). Tracing this story from its classical origins to its early modern usage, with special care given to genre and etymology, King reveals how Phaethousa's story cast into question which features of the body signal sex. In particular, the wombs and menses irrevocably complicate the one-sex model: there never was a male equivalent to the female womb, and the physiology of fluids, not just genital anatomy, was essential to understanding sexual difference.

The final part of The One-Sex Body on Trial explores the several early modern narrative adaptations about Agnodice: a virgin female who disguised herself as a man to receive medical training from the physician Herophilus and then attend to women patients. To assuage her first patient's modesty, Agnodice visually revealed her femaleness. A similar proof by lifting her tunic also took place in court, after Agnodice had been charged with seducing her patients. Demonstration and shame in connection with sex and medicine, then, are key themes in Agnodice's story. King describes how Agnodice's story speaks to the ‘changing sex politics of medicine’ as it was used to various ends in early modern debates about medical authority, ranging from proof that there were no midwives in antiquity, to evidence that women could be physicians, to instances of how women healers best serve women patients (p. 180).

Scholars can now see King's as a preferred resource on the one-sex body. I had the good fortune to begin reviewing The One-Sex Body on Trial just before giving an undergraduate lecture about sex and gender in the Enlightenment, which had Laqueur's book as a set reading. Any historian exploring gender, sex or midwifery from antiquity to early modernity would do well to add King's expert study to their bibliographies. Her considered examination of Phaethousa and Agnodice are exemplary in their astute observations and careful methodology of using later variations ‘as a way of returning to the original texts and thinking about what they meant when they were composed’ (p. 124). King also offers some fascinating observations about sex politics and gendered bodies by occasionally casting an eye toward to the modern era, although this is the kind of quick, narrow glimpse for which King checks Laqueur.

If Laqueur persuades readers with an alluring thesis and evocative examples, King convinces with thoroughness, particularity and rigour. Indeed, the shortcomings and shortcuts of Laqueur's study are clearly demonstrated. But will King's treatment put Laqueur's theory of a one-sex/two-sex historical shift to rest? Unlikely, but it will significantly complicate his claims and help relegate them to a scholarly moment now past. King's study has its own source limitations, as she keeps close to her speciality in gynaecology and midwifery texts, to the disregard of many other kinds of medical, cultural, philosophical and legal source important to the history of sex and gender. At times King plays into the easy binary model that Laqueur set out, and even offers a competing claim ‘that any debate between one- and two-sex models was happening not at the start of the eighteenth century, but in the sixteenth’ (p. 124). Yet The One-Sex Body on Trial offers the best synthesis of scholarly comment on Laqueur's thesis, making it an essential critique of Making Sex.