Leigh Whaley Women and the Practise of Medical Care in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. vi $+ $ 316, £55.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-2302-8291-9

Abstract

This is an ambitious book with an extensive bibliography. The subject matter covered, a comparative study of women and medicine from the late medieval to the modern period, is far too broad for the less than two hundred pages devoted to it. Because of this, a number of problems arise in the book. The most serious of these is that, because of the amount of information packed into every page, no space is left to develop a coherent over-arching argument that would make sense of this information and give the reader insight into the temporal and cultural contexts in which the women medical practitioners were working. The writing is also very hard to follow at a very basic level; in one paragraph, the author will jump from one topic or historical figure to another without explaining the connection between the two – this happens, for example, on page 13, but also on many other pages. Other information is presented in misleading or confusing ways, for example when we are told on pages 15 and 16 that one practitioner flourished for thirteen years, but died at the age of nineteen. Certainly these implausible circumstances justify some explanation of the miraculously youthful prodigy who was practising medicine at the age of six! With a fair degree of frequency, historical figures are briefly introduced, dropped, and then reintroduced with a more extensive biography, often after a long digression into another figure or historical context with no apparent link to the first figure. It is hard to discern a structure other than the roughly chronological one in each chapter. The encyclopaedic method of writing the history of women in medicine leads to some truly grievous errors, of which I will offer only two of many examples. First, the author repeatedly cites the works of Francois Rabelais as historical documentation of negative attitudes towards midwives. She treats these satirical literary works as if they function in the same way as court documents or other historical records. To make this work, she has to perform a sleight of hand on page 105, when she cites the story of the giant Gargantua’s miraculous birth through his mother’s ear. By cutting out the actual description of this impossible birth, the author tries to convince her readers that Rabelais’s text is a straightforward condemnation of midwives rather than a satirical account of a mythical birth. This one example demonstrates amply how problematic it can be to use literary works as historical documents without the benefit of in-depth textual analysis. Even more problematic to my mind is the brief discussion of Louise Bourgeois, midwife to members of the French royal family (pp. 96–105). Although she cites Wendy Perkins’ excellent book on Bourgeois, the author does not seem actually to have read it, because she seems unaware of the controversy fueled by Charles Guillemeau, which virtually ended Bourgeois’s career following the death of the princess Marie de Bourbon-Montpensier a week after the birth of her child. Given that one argument that could be made, based on the evidence cited in this study, is that the role of women in medical practice was increasingly circumscribed over the course of the early modern period, it is odd not to include this very well-known example of the marginalisation of midwives. Much recent scholarship has been devoted to the topic of women in medieval and early modern medicine, and there are significant gaps in the author’s knowledge of current scholarship, most notably Katharine Park’s superb study, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Cambridge, MA: Zone, 2006), which would have been particularly useful for Whaley’s third chapter, on ‘Early Modern Notions of Women’. The wealth of material available on the topic of women and the practice of medicine in pre-modern times, both primary and secondary sources, is so considerable as to make the task of writing a general study of this subject daunting, if not impossible, for one person to take on, particularly in such a brief space. So it is perhaps inevitable that this book, for all the extensive research undertaken, is nonetheless disappointing.