A Spanish Midwife Appeals to the King: Luisa Rosado’s Challenge to Eighteenth-Century Male Medical Corporatism*

Despite emulation’s constant efforts—for its violent sword excludes nothing—the distance that exists between what is acquired and what is freely God-given cannot be concealed from your supreme royal wisdom.¹

Thus did the Spanish midwife, Luisa Rosado, explain the difference between men’s source of obstetrical knowledge and her own in one of her appeals to King Charles III during the legal process that she herself initiated in 1770. Her knowledge, which, she stated, came to her from God himself, should not surprise her contemporaries, since they were aware that “Divine Mercy, in order to display its power in great works, frequently utilizes as its instrument the most weak and humble.”² Identifying herself as a vehicle of divine manifestation, she established the essential difference between her source and that of the men: if male medical knowledge could be acquired by learning, the source of female knowledge was inherent to their sex. Therefore, the practice and experiences of each must necessarily be different, and men of science, who arbitrated the eligibility of all health care professionals in eighteenth-century Spain, should accept as legitimate women’s source of knowledge.

Yet Rosado was exceptional among Spanish midwives because she was the only one who defined herself as God’s instrument. Although there were at least fourteen treatises written by midwives from other European countries since the seventeenth century, in Spain the first book on childbirth written by a woman dates from 1870.³ One reason for this absence of works that dealt with what was considered a woman’s issue is the diversity of terms used to identify the role of the midwife, which contributed to the uncertainty concerning what these women did and what they knew, since the terms, each with various shades of meaning, were not completely synonymous. Monserrat Cabré has demonstrated that, for Spain, the different terms acknowledging the work of female medical practitioners were related to the semantic field of “woman” and “mother.” Many documents describe midwives based on their sex, avoiding terms that would grant them scientific or legal competence and authority. In Spanish sources, a midwife could appear under the label of matrona, comadre, madrina, partera, alcahueta, or simply, as mujer (woman).⁴ All these terms not only belong to the same semantic field, they also reveal the continuum of female medical tasks as well as the diversity of perspectives about women.

Of all these words, only partera was an unambiguous term that signified a woman who assisted another during pregnancy and labor, recognizing her medical knowledge; the others did not emphasize clinical skills, but only the different degrees of social reputation that were conferred upon these women. Identifying a person as a matrona granted her higher social value, while the term alcahueta expressed disdain motivated by a perceived lack of their credibility.⁵ One of the midwives’ functions was to witness and confirm what occurred in private, thus providing invaluable legal testimony—in order to establish a young woman’s virginity or the legitimacy of a newborn; and to confirm the consummation of sexual intercourse by a married couple, thus recognizing the fulfillment of the sacrament.⁶ Women were called upon by civil and ecclesiastical courts to provide testimony during trials to annul marriages, to approve lineages, and to rule on rape cases. In Spain, the terms used by educated men to refer to the women who provided such legal testimony tended to minimize their medical knowledge; they focused, instead, on their moral character.

Latin medical, ecclesiastical, and civil treatises mainly applied the terms obstetrix and matrona to midwives; they were translated into Spanish at the end of the fifteenth century as partera and matrona, respectively.⁷ However, documents in the vernacular reveal that the various words used in Spain were not intended to denote medical knowledge, but only to express the level of the woman’s credibility. There was significant distance between the Latin terms and their translation in texts for an educated audience, on the one hand, and the expressions...