Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (review)

Pursuing her exploration of the origin of western gynecology, Helen King’s latest book, Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium, examines the destiny of a single medical compendium on women’s diseases from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. First published in 1566, The Gynaeciorum libri amounted to 1,097 folio pages by its third edition in 1597, and included an astounding compilation of classical, medieval, and Arabic treatises along with more recent early modern texts. It was found time and again in medical libraries, covered with annotations by anonymous or illustrious owners, and used as a reference book long after its content should have been deemed obsolete.

King sketches the reception of this book throughout four centuries, demonstrating by minute analysis of compilers’ rhetorical strategies, owners’ marginalia, and library holdings that medical history should be read as a creative process of selection, rewriting, and appropriation of texts from the past.

Not only did the definition of gender fluctuate throughout time, but a single book, or even a single author’s work, could display at a given time plural definitions of the feminine to suit specific strategies concerned with asserting male authority over obstetrical practices. If a specialized branch of medicine dedicated exclusively to the knowledge and treatment of women’s disease was to be established, its theoretical foundations had to answer two questions: what makes a woman, and where is this difference located? King revisits the nature (essential or not) and location (one single organ or the whole body) of gender in early modern medicine and culture.

Her strongest and most controversial contribution is her refutation of a unidirectional model of history that sets artificial starting and ending points to medical traditions and theories of gender. Her detailed and nuanced exploration of the reception of an already complex (and not altogether ideologically consistent) book reveals that cultural history is shaped by successive waves of scientific and ideological models, waves that ebb and flow with the changing needs and claims of new generations of readers. In particular, King challenges Thomas Laqueur’s thesis of a one-time shift from a “one-sex” to a “two-sex” model of gender in the eighteenth century. First proposed in Making Sex (1990), this model views the eighteenth century as a turning point that brought forth an unprecedented mental reconfiguration of the definition of gender: while the female body — including her reproductive system — was previously understood as a (less perfect) version of the male, the rise of male midwifery in the eighteenth century would have relied on the new assumption that women are different in essence, therefore requiring a new branch of medicine to cater to their unique conditions.

But King’s longterm history, rooted in her rock-solid background in classical medicine, shows that the history of science, of gender, and maybe of ideas, is by no means linear. Instead, it evolved through multidirectional appropriations and reinterpretations of the past: the Hippocratic corpus already contained significant texts claiming that male and female bodies are radically different, and this tradition resurfaced time and again, notably in the sixteenth century, long before the supposedly dramatic “revolution” of the eighteenth century.

Hippocrates’ Diseases of Women, forgotten during the medieval period but translated into Latin in 1525 by Marco Fabio Calvi, commented by Maurice de la Corde in the 1580s, and included in the Gynaeciorum libri, provided sixteenth-century male practitioners a classical model and a theory of gender that justified and even required the existence of erudite specialists of the second sex. According to King, Laqueur’s model of the defeat of the one-sex body in the eighteenth century overlooks both classical and early modern antecedents.

By looking at readers’ annotations, King is also able to trace which parts of the...