Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

The Gynaeciorum libri, the 'Books on [the diseases of] women,' a compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on gynaecology, is the inspiration for this intensive exploration of the origins of a subfield of medicine. This collection was first published in 1566, with a second edition in 1586/8 and a third, running to 1097 folio pages, in 1597. While examining the origins of the compendium, Helen King here concentrates on its reception, looking at a range of different uses of the book in the history of medicine from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Looking at the competition and collaboration among different groups of men involved in childbirth, and between men and women, she demonstrates that arguments about history were as important as arguments about the merits of different designs of forceps. She focuses on the eighteenth century, when the 'man-midwife' William Smellie found his competence to practise challenged on the grounds of his allegedly inadequate grasp of the history of medicine. In his lectures, Smellie remade the 'father of medicine', Hippocrates, as the 'father of midwifery'. The close study of these texts results in a fresh perspective on Thomas Laqueur's model of the defeat of the one-sex body in the eighteenth century, and on the origins of gynaecology more generally. King argues that there were three occasions in the history of western medicine on which it was claimed that women's difference from men was so extensive that they required a separate branch of medicine: the fifth century BC, and the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. By looking at all three occasions together, and by tracing the links not only between ancient Greek ideas and their Renaissance rediscovery, but also between the Renaissance compendium and its later owners, King analyzes how the claim of female 'difference' was shaped by specific social and cultural conditions. Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology makes a genuine contribution not only to the history of medicine and its subfield of gynaecology, but also to gender and cultural studies. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 6 List of Illustrations 8 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction: Towards Gynaecology 12 The Gynaeciorum libri 12 The significance of gynaecology 19 Authority over the womb 27 A ‘century of change’? 37 1 Prefacing Women: Owners and Users 40 Prefacing women 41 Owners and annotators 53 Treating menstrual disorders 63 Sterility and the uterine mole 70 2 Medical History and Obstetric Practice in William Smellie 76 Smellie vs Burton: haste, error and rivalry 78 The making of a man-midwife 83 Smellie and midwives 84 The laboratory of lying-in 87 Training men-midwives 90 Looking to the past 94 Using Hippocrates 102 Smellie’s sources 111 3 Guilty of ‘Male-practice’? Burton’s Attack on Smellie 118 Disputes in action 119 Languages 125 The lithopedion of Sens 128 The case of the ass’s urine 132 To cut or not to cut? 137 Beyond the wicker woman 142 The ‘noble instrument’ 148 Avicenna 152 Albucasis 154 Ancient instruments 162 4 Delighting in a ‘Bit of Antiquity’: Sir James Young Simpson 166 Collecting the past 169 Defining gynaecology 175 Simpson and the classics 183 Performing the part both of man and woman: Simpson and gender 186 Those most bitter pains: justifying chloroform 194 Conclusion 202 Bibliography 206 Index 230