The Art of Childbirth: A Bilingual Edition by Marie Baudoin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• The Art of Childbirth: A Bilingual Edition by Marie Baudoin
• Lianne McTavish

Marie Baudoin. The Art of Childbirth: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. and trans. Cathy McClive. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 98. New York: Iter Press, 2022. x + 244 pp. Ill $54.95 (978-1-64959-078-7).

Cathy McClive has produced the first thorough analysis of a previously unpublished manuscript written in 1671 by French midwife Marie Baudoin. McClive’s book begins with a masterful introduction to the life and work of Baudoin, who was the chief mistress-midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu in Clermont-Ferrand, located about 420 kilometres south of Paris. This lengthy introduction (132 pp.) is followed by an annotated translation of the seventeenth-century French text (44 pp.), and then a transcription of it (34 pp.). The translation into English of a largely unknown midwifery text is important, and it sheds new light on the early modern period.

McClive’s introduction is arguably the highlight of the publication. Meticulously researched, it draws on her expertise in the history of childbirth to place Baudoin’s writing within the context of early modern midwifery practice and theories of childbirth. The introduction goes, however, far beyond the medical domain to consider the diverse circumstances that shaped Baudoin’s midwifery text. McClive draws on archival sources to examine Baudoin’s personal relationships, notably her marriage and position within an influential Jansenist network, as well as the midwife’s savvy use of microcredit to pursue her goals after separating from her husband, and her role in managing disputes with the soeurs grises at the hospital in Clermont-Ferrand. McClive further considers the materiality of the midwifery manuscript, the opportunities and limitations of surviving historical records, and the gendered dynamics that inform all of the topics she addresses. This nuanced approach reveals the complex life of one early modern French woman, while undermining simplistic understandings of early modern midwifery, including the idea that male practitioners used instruments, while women did not.

The original manuscript by Baudoin is unique in several respects. It was written in the form of a forty-page letter, addressed to the Parisian physician Noël Vallant, perhaps at his request. Though Vallant had planned to publish Baudoin’s discussion of her midwifery theory and hands-on practice, he never did so. Sections of Baudoin’s text were published in 1899, when physician Paul-Émile Le Maguet extracted parts of the letter from Vallant’s portefeuille, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and commented on them in his medical thesis, but, as McClive shows, he excluded the most innovative and historically interesting aspects of the manuscript.¹ McClive suggests that Le Maguet deliberately removed evidence [End Page 326] of Baudoin’s authoritative knowledge and decision-making abilities; it is less clear why the manuscript was never published by Vallant. Here, McClive notes that Baudoin’s practice was relatively unhampered by the medical hierarchy in Clermont-Ferrand, where the regulation of midwifery occurred later than it did in Paris. The midwife’s seeming independence and broad scope of practice may have become more problematic as regulation increased in the provincial town, causing Vallant to be cautious about publication.

Among the most compelling material in Baudoin’s manuscript is both her assertion that female midwives performed autopsies on women who had died in childbirth (p. 69) and her references to her own use of surgical instruments to intervene in childbirth. Baudoin borrows a hook from a surgeon, and mentions it as if in passing, implying that her use of instruments was unremarkable (p. 150). Even more striking is the midwife’s description of inventing her own instrument: “Seeing that my fingers could not do what I wanted them to do, I had a crochet or a hook made, not with pointed ends, but with rounded and well-polished ends, so that it could slip between the cervix and the infant’s neck” (p. 154). McClive highlights the significance of this instance, which indicates that Baudoin confidently designed and employed instruments, even as she “pa[id] lip service” to the medical hierarchy elsewhere in her text (p. 101). This evidence contributes...