Louise Bourgeois’s School of Learning and Action

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Notes

¹ According to Monica H. Green, Trota de Salerno (fl. twelfth century) was one of two women who wrote in Latin on women’s health prior to the Renaissance (Green vii). The Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was “the only other woman known to have written on aspects of women’s medicine” (Green, “‘Traittié’” VI: 177n75). See also Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine 239.

² Harold J. Cook remarks that “attempts to ground moral and physical knowledge on the close study of natural phenomena rather than first principles [as Aristotle believed was necessary] became ever more common over the course of the sixteenth century” (415); see also Gianna Pomata, “A Word of the Empirics” 1.

³ Some examples of her many innovations: Bourgeois was the first to recommend that labor be induced in the case of a contracted pelvis; she also provided new protocols for handling umbilical prolapse and managing fetal face presentation; she clarified the appropriate procedure for cutting the umbilical cord when it was wound around the neck (Kalisch et al. 1).

⁴ On hands-on knowledge see Long 11–22; Smith 156.

⁵ See Hardwick on how early modern era people often operated in family-based work units, sharing their skills and knowledge even, in some cases, when the trade or enterprise in question had gender-based training associated with it. My thanks to McClive for suggesting this reference.

⁶ My thanks to Stephanie O’Hara for pointing out this passage.

⁷ Information on Our Bodies Ourselves is from the book’s website (https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/our-story); see the editors’ introduction to this issue for a discussion of the parallels between Our Bodies Ourselves and Bourgeois’s Observations diverses.

⁸ “In the medical hierarchy of early modern Paris, midwives held the lowest position due to the kind of work they performed and to their lack of formal training. Above them stood the barber-surgeons and apothecaries who had formal training as apprentices, who sometimes took special classes at universities, and who enjoyed the privileges and status of being members of guilds. However, these medical practitioners ranked fairly low in the hierarchy because they engaged in manual labor. The surgeons ranked next: although they were often well-educated and, in Paris, mimicked the dress and professional rituals of the physicians, they were considered merely skilled craftsmen like the barbers, apothecaries, and midwives because they, too, engaged in the mechanical arts. Physicians ranked above all these other practitioners because, on the whole, they disdained manual labor or indeed any use of their hands. Their university training and knowledge of Latin separated them from the rank and file, allowing them to enjoy an authority and respect that the other members of the medical hierarchy did not” (Klairmont Lingo, “Editor’s Introduction” 16n5). See also Lindemann, 124–48.

⁹ See Klairmont Lingo, “Editor’s Introduction” 25–26 for details on these statutes, which are available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in a 1587 edition that includes related documents (Statuts).

¹⁰ Bourgeois’s chapter titles reveal the extent to which she focused on problems associated with female reproduction – including infertility, reproductive illness, complicated births, and post-partum difficulties – rather than more typical aspects of a woman’s reproductive life, though she clearly felt that the educated midwife needed to be familiar with both the common and the unusual or difficult. Jacques Guillemeau’s 1609 volume on childbirth, De l’heureux accouchement des femmes, instructed midwives on how to attend normal births; see Guillemeau, Child-Birth for the 1612 English translation.

¹¹ On sore nipples, see 155. On infertility, see 104–14. On stretch marks, see 127.

¹² On the history of anatomy and the specific place that the female body played in it, see Park.

¹³ Carrier 78–79 points out that the Hôtel-Dieu offered three-month-long apprenticeships for no more than four interns. Until 1630 these internships were awarded only to the daughters of midwives who worked at the hospital. Instances where Bourgeois mentions a dissection she witnessed or heard about include 110, 128, 154, and 181–82. In regard to her “in” at the Hôtel-Dieu, see 222. See also; Klairmont Lingo, “Editor’s Introduction” 27.

¹⁴ On the connection between observation and empiricism, see; Pomata, “Observation Rising”; “Sharing Cases.” See also Dear.

¹⁵ This level of detail is as common in the Observations diverses as it is in other manuals. See, for example, Guillemeau, De l’heureux accouchement 260–63.

¹⁶ My thanks to Cathy McClive for suggesting these ideas in a private correspondence.

¹⁷ Alkermes included kermes (dried insects) as its principal ingredient as well as raw silk, rosewater, lapis lazuli, amber, cinnamon, and aloe, though Bourgeois does not list her own recipe. “The pregnant female of the insect genus Allokermes, formerly referred to as a grain or a berry, gathered in large quantities from a species of evergreen oak in South Europe and North Africa, for use in dyeing and in medicine” (OED, s.v. “kermes”).

¹⁸ See, for a modern comparison, “Clinical Practice Guideline Cord Prolapse.”

¹⁹ For a fuller comparison between Bourgeois and Guillemeau, see Sheridan. For an overview and selected translations of Guillemeau’s midwifery manual, see; Worth-Stylianou, Pregnancy and Birth 141–22.

²⁰ The Privilège du Roy (royal permission to print) that appears in his manual, L’heureux accouchement, was dated 23 March 1609; the one given for his “Prefatory Epistle” is for a few days later, on 1 April. The Privilège that appears in Bourgeois’s 1609 Observations diverses was dated several months earlier, on 24 December 1608.

²¹ Guillemeau, De l’heureux accouchement 298–300. My and Stephanie O’Hara’s translation.

²² Guillemeau, De l’heureux accouchement “Epitre liminaire.” My translation.

²³ On women’s recipe collections see for instance Leong, “Collecting Knowledge”; “Herbals”; Recipes; Pennell; Perkins, “Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Recueil.’”.

²⁴ Self-taught healers published “books of secrets” that included recipes in the vernacular for a popular audience who sought to cure themselves. See Eamon, Science; “Markets”; Klairmont Lingo, “Empirics.” On the same trend in England, see Fissell, esp. 138–41, 189–90. For a later period in France see Ramsay.

²⁵ It is interesting to note that Guybert and Bourgeois lived in the same building on rue Saint-André des Arts – a building of which they each owned half (Lehoux 135). However, Bourgeois does not mention him specifically in her text as someone with whom she collaborated.

²⁶ Notable, however, are the few exceptions to this generalization, for example when Bourgeois provides recipes for green sickness and describes how they helped men who suffered from it as well as her discussion of worms, which Lianne McTavish has analyzed in detail in her contribution to this issue.

²⁷ See Valerie Worth-Stylianou’s contribution to this issue regarding how unusual it was for a female author to discuss women’s infertility secrets in a midwifery manual. On this male take-over, see Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine, 31–38, 246–48.

²⁸ See Valerie Worth-Stylianou’s contribution to this issue. According to Green, as early as the medieval period “gynecology (and even what we might call advisory obstetrics) had become a fairly normative part of many male physicians’ practice (Making Women’s Medicine 23, 85–92). Green also states that in 1449, just prior to the advent of the printing press, “the field of gynaecology was exploding into a fully-fledged subdiscipline of medicine” so that “[b]y the end of the sixteenth century, it would be represented not only by dozens of newly published books […] but by university lectures, a published list of authorities in the field, and even its own ‘insider’ controversies” (Making Women’s Medicine vii, 246–65).

²⁹ See King, “Female Fluids,” which contends that women’s bodies contains “fluids” as well as “humors”: “According to the beliefs common to [Hippocrates’s] Diseases of Women and the Epidemics, then, women are dominated by blood, but also contain bile and phlegm, and substances that resemble pus and mucus. This is a body of fluids, but not precisely a body of humors .” See also, King, Hippocrates’ Woman 212–46 for a discussion of the wandering womb according to ancient Greek thinkers.

³⁰ Purging involves the use of a laxative or enema to clear the intestinal tract. Cupping is the operation of drawing blood by scarifying the skin and applying a cup or cupping glass. The air under the glass is then rarefied by heat or another means (OED, s.v. “cupping”).

³¹ On green sickness see King, The Disease of Virgins; see also Bourgeois, Midwife 110–11nn65–70.

³² See also Worth-Stylianou, Pregnancy and Birth 66–74, which includes translations and edited selections from Liebault’s work with discussion of its structure, argument, style, circulation, and afterlife, as well as an overview of his life and other works.

³³ “A white sugar in a form both granular and lumpy, as opposed to being formed into a sugarloaf” (Bourgeois, Midwife, “Glossary” 328).

³⁴ My thanks to Cathy McClive for pointing out this difference.

³⁵ My thanks to Stephanie O’Hara for suggesting this example.

³⁶ The French title of this narrative, found in volume two, is “Instruction à ma fille”; Randle Cotgrave translates “instruction” in his 1611 French/English dictionary to mean “an instruction, direction, precept; caveat; memorial, remembrance; also instruction, teaching, tutoring, ordering.” However, in Bourgeois, Midwife, we chose to retain the traditional translation of this title in English-language scholarly literature, namely, “Advice to My Daughter.”

³⁷ On the complexities related to determining pregnancy see McClive.

³⁸ Stillbirths are still prevalent even today. Current risk factors include advanced as well as young maternal age, maternal nutrition, prior pregnancy losses, complicated and multiple pregnancies, as well as poor economic conditions and maternal healthcare (Newtonraj et al., et al. 371). Similar factors would have been at play in early modern France as well.

While we do not have accurate figures for the early modern period, we do have some figures from the writings of the eighteenth-century American midwife Martha Ballard. Between 1785 and 1812 Ballard delivered 814 babies, 14 (1.8%) of which were stillborn. Hall Jackson, a contemporary of Ballard, delivered 511 babies, 12 (2.4%) of which were stillborn. The rate of stillbirths in the United States in 1942 was 2%, with “fetal death ratio defined as fetal deaths of 28 weeks or more gestation per 1000 births for the U.S” (Ulrich 172–74). Ulrich explains that the higher rate of stillbirths associated with hospital births as well as with those involving physicians who employed ergot, opiates, and forceps in the nineteenth century and other kinds of interventions in the twentieth-century hospital explain the higher rates.

³⁹ On anger, see Worth-Stylianou’s contribution to this issue.

⁴⁰ See, for example, the very popular 1536 manual by Rösslin.

⁴¹ See Lianne McTavish’s contribution to this issue.

⁴² Perkins, “Midwives” (esp. 152–53) addresses the larger context and significance of this passage.

⁴³ See also Bourgeois, Midwife 299–301 and 302–3, in which she brings up two very different cases involving incompetent physicians. Perkins discusses these two cases and states that Bourgeois critiques the physicians’ poor handling of their patients in order “to reduce the status of the physician” (“Midwives” 151–53).

⁴⁴ Broomhall discusses how the early modern emphasis on “experience as an essential part of knowledge and the validity of an author’s originality and individuality could allow women writers to make use of their gender to find an authorial voice.” Indeed, paradoxically, “being of ‘the other’ gender represented, for some women, access to some authority as an author” (Women and the Book Trade 83–84). See also McTavish, Childbirth, 113–42 on the ways male medical practitioners of the era displayed and created their own authority as birth attendants. On the development of empiricism, see Dear, 106–13; Pomata, “Observation Rising.”