Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Practices of Looking and the Medical Humanities: Imagining the Unborn in France, 1550–1800

  • Published:
Journal of Medical Humanities Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Visuality is a concept used to study vision as an historically and culturally specific activity. Curriculum in the medical humanities could address visuality by stressing how different kinds of practitioners and peoples learn how to see. This paper introduces the visual training promoted by the discipline of art history, analysing early modern French medical images of the unborn as a case study. The goal is to encourage medical practitioners to reflect on their own visual skills, comparing and contrasting them with the visual methodologies of art history.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See A. R. Baerwald, G. P. Adams, and R. A. Pierson, “A New Model for Ovarian Follicular Development during the Human Menstrual Cycle,” Fertility and Sterility 80, 1 (July 2003), 116–22.

  2. S. Franklin, “Rethinking Nature/Culture: Anthropology and the New Genetics,” Anthropological Theory 3, 1 (2003), 65–85.

  3. H. Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), ix.

  4. J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

  5. For a critique of Crary’s account of early modern vision see D. Summers, “Suspension of Perception (Book Review)” The Art Bulletin 83, 1 (March 2001), 57–61, and L. McTavish, “Concealing Spectacles: Childbirth and Visuality in Early Modern France,” in M. Cheetham, E. Legge, and C. Soussloff, eds, Editing (Out?) The Image (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 95–114.

  6. See J. P. Plottel, “Introduction,” in J. P. Plottel and H. Charney, eds, Inter-textuality: New Perspectives in Criticism (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1978), xiv, and J. Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

  7. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986).

  8. M. Bal and N. Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73, 2 (1991), 174–208.

  9. R. Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  10. See, for example, E. Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy 1350–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  11. A. Bleakley, R. Marshall, and R. Brömer, “Toward and Aesthetic Medicine: Developing a Core Medical Humanities Undergraduate Curriculum,” Journal of Medical Humanities 27 (2006), 197–213.

  12. F. Mauriceau, Des maladies des femmes grosses et accouchées (Paris, 1668), 312–15. See also my book, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

  13. J.-L. Baudelocque, Principes sur l’art des accouchemens (Paris, 1787, orig. 1775), 486.

  14. K. B. Roberts and J. D. W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 447–71.

  15. L. Jordanova, “Gender, Generation and Science: William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas,” W.F. Bynum and R. Porter, eds. William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 385–412.

  16. A. Henderson, “Doll-Machines and Butcher-Shop Meat: Models of Childbirth in the Early Stages of Industrial Capitalism,” Genders 12 (Winter 1991), 100–119.

  17. For Muscio see E. Ingerslev, “Rösslin’s ‘Rosengarten’: Its Relation to the Past (the Muscio Manuscripts and Soranos), particularly with regard to Podalic Version,” The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the British Empire 15 (January 1909), 1–25.

  18. W. Arons, trans. and intro., Eucharius Rösslin: When Midwifery Became the Male Physician’s Province. The Sixteenth Century Handbook “The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives”, Newly Englished (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1994), 3.

  19. See M. de La Motte, Traité complet des accouchemens (Paris, 1729, orig. 1721), 122, for a description of the child initiating delivery. For the womb as a prison see Viardel, Observations sur la pratique des accouchemens naturels, contre nature & monstrueux (Paris, 1671), 16, and P. Peu, La pratique des accouchemens (Paris, 1694), 477.

  20. J. Guillemeau, De l’heureux accouchement des femmes (Paris, 1609), 168: “l’enfant s’efforce & roidist pour sortir dehors, & que la matrice se bande & reserre pour estre delivree de ce fardeau.”

  21. Guillemeau, De l’heureux accouchement des femmes, preface: “Or pour la dexterité, il n’y a rien de comparaison avec les autres orations [sic]: car il ne se faict aucunes oeuvres en Chirurgie, où il ne soit necessaire de voir clair, soit par la lumiere, qui nous est donnee du jour, ou de la chandelle... Au contraire, en ceste operation...il faut chercher l’enfant en quelque situation qu’il soit, sans le pouvoir voir.”

  22. P. Dionis, Traité général des accouchemens (Paris, 1718), 247.

  23. M. de La Motte, A General Treatise of Midwifry, T. Tomkyns, trans. (London, 1746), 185 conflates touching with seeing, as does Peu, La pratique des accouchemens, 408 and 450, and Paul Portal, La pratique des accouchemens (Paris, 1685), 2, 5, 53, 79, and 204.

  24. Peu, La pratique des accouchements, 51–54. Other practitioners offer the same advice. See also Portal, La pratique des accouchemens, 27, who advises the surgeon man-midwife: “examiner doucement avec le doigt, si on sent la bouche, le nez, les yeux, le front, & le menton de l’Enfant. En ayant observé & reconnu que c’est la face...”

  25. Peu, La pratique des accouchemens, 441: “Voila une partie des situations où j’ai trouvé les enfans réduits par l’enlacement de leur cordon, qui en comprennent beaucoup de moindre conséquence, & qui peuvent servir comme d’idée principale pour s’en réprésenter une infinité d’autres possibles.”

  26. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 4, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931–1935), 86–87.

  27. See, for example, Mauriceau, Des maladies des femmes grosses et accouchées, 194–5, and 209, as well as Portal, La pratique des accouchemens, 7.

  28. K. Newman, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

  29. J.-F. Sacombe, Élémens de la science des accouchemens (Paris, 1801), 129.

  30. J. Mesnard, Le guide des accoucheurs (Paris, 1743), A. M. Le Boursier du Coudray, Abrégé de l’art des accouchements (Paris, 1777), J. G. Roederer, Élémens de l’art d’accouchemens (Paris, 1765), N. Puzos, Traité des accouchemens (Paris, 1759), Jean Astruc, L’art d’accoucher réduit à ses principes (Paris, 1766), A. Petit, Traité des maladies des femmes enceintes (Paris, 1799).

  31. Baudelocque, Principes sur l’art des accouchemens, 19-34; he used a pelvimeter, described in detail in his L’art des accouchemens (Paris, 1796, orig. 1781), 78.

  32. Baudelocque, Principes sur l’art des accouchemens, 35–36.

  33. A. Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England 1660–1770 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79-82.

  34. M. Garber, “Out of Joint,” in D. Hillman and C. Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997), 22–51.

  35. L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 189–213.

  36. Such pelvic examinations are described in Baudelocque, Principes sur l’art des accouchemens, 50, Puzos, Traité des accouchemens, 9, and Petit, Traité des maladies des femmes enceintes, 54.

  37. Jordanova, “Gender, Generation and Science,” 192.

  38. Baudelocque, L’art des accouchemens, xlviii.

  39. M. Guédron, De chair et de marbre: Imiter et exprimer le nu en France (1745–1815) (Paris: Champion, 2003). See also F. H. Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  40. Mauriceau, Des maladies des femmes grosses et accouchées, 313.

  41. Baudelocque, Principes sur l’art des accouchemens, 470.

  42. A. Levret, L’art des accouchemens (Paris, 1753).

  43. Baudelocque, Principes sur l’art des accouchemens, avertissement, xi–xii.

  44. For a discussion of mannequins see J. Schlumbohm, “‘The Pregnant Women are here for the Sake of the Teaching Institution’: The Lying-In Hospital of Göttingen University, 1751 to c. 1830,” Social History of Medicine 14, 1 (2001), 59–78.

  45. M. Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 95.

  46. See, for example, P. Sue, Essais historiques, littéraires et critiques, sur l’art des accouchemens (Paris, 1779).

  47. L. McTavish, “Embryos in the Early Modern and Modern Periods: A Visual Dialogue,” in Nisker et al., ed. The Healthy Embryo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Alberta, 3-98 Fine Arts Building, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2C9

    Lianne McTavish

Authors
  1. Lianne McTavish
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lianne McTavish.

Additional information

Funding for research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

McTavish, L. Practices of Looking and the Medical Humanities: Imagining the Unborn in France, 1550–1800. J Med Humanit 31, 11–26 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-009-9099-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-009-9099-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation