Cinq Livres, de la manière de nourrir et gouverner les enfans dès leur naissance (review)

Colette Winn, a professor of French at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has produced a fine critical edition of Vallambert's treatise of 1565, the first work on pediatrics to appear in the French language. Her lengthy introduction provides a useful discussion of the competitive medical world in sixteenth-century France, the history of publications concerning children's illnesses, and early modern debates about the merits of maternal breast-feeding instead of wet-nursing. Winn is familiar with the medical literature of this period, having edited and annotated various seventeenth-century texts written by Louise Bourgeois, the royal midwife to Queen Marie de Médicis from 1601 to 1609 (Récit véritable de la naissance de messeigneurs et dames les enfans de France, 2000), as well as texts by other early modern French women. Though produced by a male physician, Vallambert's book sheds additional light on the history of women because of his direct address to female midwives in Book 2. His publication should thus be of interest to historians of women and gender, as well as to those studying how medical theories, concepts of disease, and understandings of childhood changed over time.

Winn reveals what little is known about Vallambert: he was born in Avalon, and studied medicine in Montpellier as well as Paris. Despite knowing both Greek and Latin, he preferred to write his treatise in French, partly to attract a broad audience unequipped with university training. In Book 1, he instructs readers—presumably fathers and mothers—how to select a nurse for a newborn child. Vallambert prefers that women breast-feed their own children, but recognizes that sometimes the mother's milk is corrupted by illness. In such cases, the required nursemaid should be selected carefully for the sake of both the child's health and its moral status, for the nurse's character traits will be imbibed along with her milk. In keeping with dominant beliefs at the time, Vallambert asserts that, after the mother and father, it is the nurse who has the greatest influence on a child (p. 94).

The physician offers detailed advice about how to care for a newborn child in Book 2, which is aimed directly at the midwives and nurses hired to assist newly delivered women. Vallambert notes that most nurses and midwives are ignorant, and in need of instruction in a language they can understand (pp. 115–16). He goes on to insist that his efforts to teach these ignorant women in no way endow them with true medical knowledge; that is founded on reading ancient texts in their original languages. Throughout the five books of his treatise, he refers to these medical authorities, especially Galen and his methods for determining the particular bodily disposition of individual clients. By focusing on the expertise required to diagnose and prescribe to children, Vallambert delineates the realm of children's health care while claiming it for physicians. In Book 3 he baldly declares the authority of physicians, stating that "the teaching of childcare belongs to doctors, and not to the midwife . . . nor the nurse" (l'enseignement du gouvernement de l'enfant appartient aux Médecins, et ni la sage-femme . . . ni la nourrice [p. 166]).

Women are, however, capable of undertaking the everyday management of children, provided they follow informed advice. Among the more surprising elements of Vallambert's guidance is his description of the necessity of bathing the newborn several times a day. He contends that changing a child's linens is not sufficient, despite the common practice of lazy nurses (p. 176). His instruction is at odds with conceptions of bathing as potentially dangerous: according to historian Georges Vigarello (Le propre et le sale: L'hygiène...