Elizabeth Branscum

Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we see two particular trends develop in England: first, male medical professionals published enormously popular ‘midwifery manuals’ that sought to make anatomical knowledge about pregnancy accessible to a wide swath of women readers. Second, women of relative means increasingly understood pregnancy as a medical event, and sought the advice and treatment of male medical practitioners. I argue that these developments were connected. Pregnant women saw their pregnancies as a state in need of medical intervention and management, but their goals for what successful management looked like did not necessarily align with those of the medical literature. Women with access to medical and anatomical frameworks used their tenets and advice flexibly, sometimes to prioritize their own lives over those of the fetuses they carried. In my dissertation, I demonstrate that English midwifery manuals advance the belief that women of all classes could – and should – benefit directly from the knowledge presented in these works. Reading the manuals alongside accounts authored by pregnant women themselves indicate that male medical practitioners and women mutually shaped ideas about pregnant bodies, at a moment when medical ideas about pregnancy were made accessible to women in new ways.