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Author: Wendy Perkins
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN: 9780859894715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
An account of the work, writings and career of Louise Bourgeois, who had a flourishing midwifery practice at the French royal court at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Bourgeois was notable as a successful and articulate woman practitioner and author. Perkins, who is an expert on French literature, has integrated into her account recent work of social historians on medicine: on the medical market place, on patient-doctor relations, especially between women and medical practitioners, and on the social construction of the body.
Author: Wendy Perkins
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN: 9780859894715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
An account of the work, writings and career of Louise Bourgeois, who had a flourishing midwifery practice at the French royal court at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Bourgeois was notable as a successful and articulate woman practitioner and author. Perkins, who is an expert on French literature, has integrated into her account recent work of social historians on medicine: on the medical market place, on patient-doctor relations, especially between women and medical practitioners, and on the social construction of the body.
Author: Lianne McTavish
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351952390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
Throughout the early modern period in France, surgeon men-midwives were predominantly associated with sexual impropriety and physical danger; yet over time they managed to change their image, and by the eighteenth century were summoned to attend even the uncomplicated deliveries of wealthy, urban clients. In this study, Lianne McTavish explores how surgeons strove to transform the perception of their midwifery practices, claiming to be experts who embodied obstetrical authority instead of intruders in a traditionally feminine domain. McTavish argues that early modern French obstetrical treatises were sites of display participating in both the production and contestation of authoritative knowledge of childbirth. Though primarily written by surgeon men-midwives, the texts were also produced by female midwives and male physicians. McTavish's careful examination of these and other sources reveals representations of male and female midwives as unstable and divergent, undermining characterizations of the practice of childbirth in early modern Europe as a gender war which men ultimately won. She discovers that male practitioners did not always disdain maternal values. In fact, the men regularly identified themselves with qualities traditionally respected in female midwives, including a bodily experience of childbirth. Her findings suggest that men's entry into the lying-in chamber was a complex negotiation involving their adaptation to the demands of women. One of the great strengths of this study is its investigation of the visual culture of childbirth. McTavish emphasizes how authority in the birthing room was made visible to others in facial expressions, gestures, and bodily display. For the first time here, the vivid images in the treatises are analysed, including author portraits and engravings of unborn figures. McTavish reveals how these images contributed to arguments about obstetrical authority instead of merely illustrating the written content of the books. At the same time, her arguments move far beyond the lying-in chamber, shedding light on the exchange of visual information in early modern France, a period when identity was largely determined by the precarious act of putting oneself on display.
Author: Jennifer F. Kosmin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000174662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Medical writers in this period devoted countless pages to investigating the secrets of women’s sexuality and the processes of generation. By the eighteenth century, male practitioners in Britain and France were even successfully advancing careers as male midwives. Yet, female midwives continued to manage the vast majority of all early modern births. An examination of developments in Italy, where male practitioners never made successful inroads into childbirth, brings into focus the complex social, religious, and political contexts that shaped the management of reproduction in early modern Europe. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy argues that new institutional spaces to care for pregnant women and educate midwives in Italy during the eighteenth century were not strictly medical developments but rather socio-political responses both to long standing concerns about honor, shame, and illegitimacy, and contemporary unease about population growth and productivity. In so doing, this book complicates our understanding of such sites, situating them within a longer genealogy of institutional spaces in Italy aimed at regulating sexual morality and protecting female honor. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of medicine, religious history, social history, and Early Modern Italy.
Author: Kirk D. Read
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317174070
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France. Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and gender; this study considers the male, female, and hermaphroditic experience, offering both an analysis of women's experiences to be sure, but also opening onto the perspectives of non-female birthers and their place in the social and political climate of early modern France. The writers explored include Rabelais, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Louise Boursier, Pierre de Ronsard, Pierre Boaistuau and Jacques Duval. Read also explores the implications of the metaphorical use of reproduction, such as the presentation of literary work as offspring and the poet/mentor relationship as that of a suckling child. Foregrounded in the study are the questions of what it means for women to embrace biological and literary reproduction and how male appropriation of the birthing body influences the mission of creating new literary traditions. Furthermore, by exploring the cases of indeterminate birthing entities and the social anxiety that informs them, Read complicates the binarisms at work in the vexed terrain of sexuality, sex, and gender in this period. Ultimately, Read considers how the narrative of birth produces historical conceptions of identity, authority, and gender.
Author: Hilary Marland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134818122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
The Art of Midwifery is the first book to examine midwives' lives and work across Europe in the early modern period. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from England, Holland, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the contributors show the diversity in midwives' practices, competence, socio-economic background and education, as well as their public function and image. The Art of Midwifery is an excellent resource for students of women's history, social history and medical history.
Author: Susan Broomhall
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526185652
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Women have long been crucial to the provision of medical services, both in the treatment of sickness and in maintaining health. In this study, Susan Broomhall situates the practices and perceptions of women’s medical work in France in the context of the sixteenth century and its medical evolution and innovations. She argues that early modern understandings of medical practice and authority were highly flexible and subject to change. She furthermore examines how a focus on female practitioners, who cut across most sectors of early modern medical practice, can reveal the multifaceted phenomenon of these negotiations for authority. This new paperback edition of Women's medical work in early modern France skilfully combines detailed research with a clear presentation of the existing literature of women’s medical work, making it invaluable to students of gender and medical history.
Author: L. Whaley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230295177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Women have engaged in healing from the beginning of history, often within the context of the home. This book studies the role, contributions and challenges faced by women healers in France, Spain, Italy and England, including medical practice among women in the Jewish and Muslim communities, from the later Middle Ages to approximately 1800.
Author: L. W. B. Brockliss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 992
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Book Description
The Medical World of Early Modern France recounts the history of medicine in France between the sixteenth century and the French Revolution. Physicians, surgeons and apothecaries are centre-stage, and the study provides an overview of long-term changes in their ideas about medicine and their craft. Other denizens of the medical world - quacks, charlatans, wise women, midwives, herbalist and others - are also brought into the analysis, which is set within the broader context of social, economic, demographic and cultural change. The breadth of the chronological and analytical framework, and the depth of the archival research behind it, makes this a unique account of the evolution of medical ideas and practices in one of the major countries of early modern Europe.
Author: Mary Lindemann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521425921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
A concise and accessible introduction to health and healing in Europe from 1500 to 1800.
Author: Dr Cathy McClive
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472453816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers. Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France presents the first full-length discussion of menstruation and its uncertain connections with embodied sex, gender and reproduction in early modern France. Attitudes to menstruation are explored in three inter-linked arenas: medicine, moral theology and law across the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of diverse sources, including court records and private documents, the author uses case studies to explore the relationship between the exceptional corporeality of individuals and attempts to construct menstrual norms, reflecting on how early modern individuals, lay or otherwise, grappled with the enigma of menstruation. She analyzes how early modern men and women accounted for the function, recurrence and appearance of menstruation, from its role in maintaining health to the link between other physiological and bodily processes, including those found in both male and female bodies. She questions the assumption that menstruation was exclusively associated with women by the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that whilst sex-related, menstruation was not sex-specific even at the turn of the nineteenth. Menstruation remains a contentious topic today. This book is not, therefore, simply a study of periods in early modern France, but is also of necessity an exploration about the nature and constitution of historical evidence, particularly bodily evidence and how historians use this evidence. It raises important questions about the concept of certainty and about the value of observation, testimony, expertise, the nature of language and the construction of bodily truths - about the body as witness and the body as evidence.
