A Woman Doctor Finds Her Name in Spite of it All, 1695

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 422

“Good wives and good plantations are the products of a good husband.”
--Benjamin Franklin 1736

“The best furniture in a house is an obedient wife”  Thomas 1808

"A little house well filled, a little land well tilled, and a little wife well willed, are great riches " John Ray 1683  [Most tidy this up by leaving off the last third of this famous little saying.]

The four anonymous/initialed authors on the title page of the first edition of The Complete Midwwife’s Practice (1659)…..claimed this book to be the first and best of its kind “since the birth of mankind” (!, chapter 4). That said, much of it was cribbed from the work of Louyse Bourgois (1564-1636), who had published  (though not under her own name) her obstetric secrets earlier in the century.   Bourgois was yet another in a long line of women who contributed to this science but whose identities were largely and obediently left to pervious memory among male authors—except in this case, where, in the fourth edition of this book, Bourgois was included in the longish-titled title page and actually has her engraved portrait included in the book.  And thus some small level of payback it realized.

Recognizing the female's importance in the writing of this book or not, the text of The Complete Midwife is still strongly constructiviist in maintaining the woman's lesser role in most aspects of reproduction, as well as many aspects outside the biological realm.

For example, we find this state-of-the-art nugget:

 This of course was nothing to raise an eyebrow over in the late 17th century--it was the state of medical knowledge seasoned with strong doses of female subjugation and slavery.

The authors of this book were revealed by the fourth edition, and one of them comes from the long line of highly questionable obstetricians and medical monsters, the Chamberlain family.
(I touched on them briefly here.) The family invented the forceps and kept the invention--which although simple was a huge aid in childbirth--secret, a utility controlled by them alone, completely in the dark, for more than 100 years.  Their secretivenesses protected the family fortune and future at a cost of untold numbers of difficult deliveries and, I'm sure, 100,000+ women and children lost in childbirth difficulties who could've been saved otherwise had the forceps been publicized and shared.  But this was not their lot, and nt their responsibility, nor their evident moral obligation...

But this jealous protection of their intellectual rights seeped out in other ways too, as in this very book, where this Chamerlain complained against one of his very own co-authors (the famous Nicholas Culpepper), who adopted a more popular approach to medicine, arguing for printing medical texts int he vernacular.  Perhaps this failing was genetic.

Perhaps the worst of the panoply of wide ideas biologically inferiorizing (?) women belongs to  Nicolas Hartsoeker  (1626-1683) who discovered "animaclues" in sperm:  whole, completely formed, "little men", who would be implanted into the furnace of woman to cook and nature them until they could be born.  This basically reduced woman to a piece of furniture--an oven--with all the great necessaries of reproduction performed by the man, a creation called the Homonculus completely generated by them,  with woman needed only as the fertile soil to plant the whole thing in.  

Comments

[Jeff]

At the risk of revealing my biases, I've found that although there are plenty of petty, small-minded women, men by far account for the world's accrual of willful, arrogant ignorance. I wonder if Franklin and Jefferson ever slapped each other on the butt? Those Chamberlains should've read Lewis Hyde's "The Gift."