Louise Bourgeois (1563–1636): Transforming the Landscape of Medicine and Midwifery

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Notes

¹ See Valerie Worth-Stylianou’s website, http://www.birthingtales.org/, the online companion to her 2013 Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern France, a critical edition and translation of excerpts from early modern physicians and surgeons Rousset, Liebault, Guillemeau, Duval, and de Serres. The site “offers non-specialists as well as Renaissance scholars a glimpse of the sheer variety and verve with which birthing tales are related in works which purport, at least, to be serious medical treatises.”

² Published by New England Press in 1971, the original title of the first 193-page course booklet stapled on newsprint in 1970 was Women and Their Bodies. See https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/our-story, accessed 9 Nov. 2019.

³ Our Bodies Ourselves was published, revised, and updated every four to seven years until October 1, 2018, when the Boston Women’s Health Collective decided, due to a lack of funds, to discontinue revising and updating the printed version of Our Bodies Ourselves as well as the updated digital and printed health information they had been providing. See https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/our-story, accessed 6/7/19; https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/2018/04/a-message-about-the-future-of-our-bodies-ourselves, accessed 11/9/19.

⁴ A good introduction to this and to other aspects of the early modern medical world is Lindemann.

⁵ See https://www.womenshistory.org/tarana-burke and https://metoomvmt.org/about/for more information.

⁶ Ariel Zimmerman, writing in the AMA Journal of Ethics, notes that “In 1992, only two article titles included the phrase [evidence-based medicine]. These were followed by a virtual avalanche of publications; in just 5 years, by 1997, more than 1,000 articles had used the new phrase.” Zimmerman, “Evidence-Based Medicine: A Short History of a Modern Medical Movement.” https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/evidence-based-medicine-short-history-modern-medical-movement/2013-01, accessed 29 Nov. 2019.

⁷ Gunter stated in a recent interview: “I don’t know the forces, but I think that certainly a lot of women’s anatomy has been neglected, a lot of women’s physiology, a lot of women’s symptoms have been neglected” (O’Leary). This echoes Bourgeois’s now centuries-old insistence that midwives formally study female anatomy and that women, in general, know the symptoms of various gynecological conditions and understand their humoral physiology.

⁸ The humoral model was primarily based upon the work of the Greek physician Galen, who embraced and codified the ideas he found in the Hippocratic treatise Nature of Man. See King, 47, 2013.

⁹ On male medics’ appropriation of women’s health care, including fertility and other gynecological matters, see Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine, 23, 71, 85–91, 119, 139, 247, 273–75.