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Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America by Marcia D. Nichols, and: Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire ed. by Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren (review)

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecs.2023.a900663

1086-315X

Medical History and Innovations

Reviewed by: Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America by Marcia D. Nichols, and: Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire ed. by Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren Kathleen Alves Marcia D. Nichols, Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America (California: Univ. of California Medical Humanities Press, 2021). Pp. 229. $19.95 paper. Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren, eds., Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire, translated by Nina M. Scott (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 152; 3 b/w illus., 1 map. $21.95 paper. In 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protection for abortion care and delegating reproductive health policy to state legislatures. The majority opinion reversed Roe's precedent on the thin basis of the Constitution's "history." Eighteenth-century scholars, including myself, were quick to note that abortion was legal throughout the American colonies and commonly practiced throughout the Americas. Women's absence in the Constitution does not stand as a wholesale reflection of the period's attitudes and practices. However, it was this period that seeded the biopolitical problem of reproductive capacity for people with uteruses, requiring management under the regime of male medical, political, and religious authority. Marcia D. Nichols's Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America and Baptism through Incision, edited by Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren with translations by Nina M. Scott, show the multifaceted entanglements of reproductive autonomy in the period. Nichols's Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America considers how three influential male midwifery authors—William Smellie, Thomas Denman, and Samuel Bard—constructed the persona of what Nichols terms the "hero-accoucher" and the "accoucher of feeling," the medical man whose purpose is to save women from themselves. And, in effect, these male midwives, through the medical treatise and the textbook, centered themselves as the heroes of their own stories in the burgeoning field of obstetric medicine. Nichols describes the "hero-accoucher" (and implicitly, the "accoucher of feeling") as rescuing the "damsel-in-distress held hostage by her weak, inferior body" (4). Not only did this approach give male midwives the respectability they desperately desired, but it also "reified masculine superiority by locating women's need of male protection within their bodies, [and] bestowed upon all women traits of delicacy and weakness—traits normally applied only to elite women" (4). Nichols's comparative analysis yields fascinating observations on the development of obstetric medicine, the rhetorical patterns and conventions in medical writing (which solidify the power of the accoucher), publication histories, the intent and impact of anatomical drawings, and the normalization of white bodies in the age of empire. Fixing Women builds on the foundational work of scholars in the medical humanities and critics in gender studies to forward a complicated argument that attempts to intersect eighteenth-century novel theory, print culture, medicine, gender, race, and class in the book's focus on midwifery manuals and anatomic atlases. Some of these observations confirm earlier (and for some readers, familiar) assumptions of the ways in which male medical writers constructed a masculine (and most often, nationalistic and paternalistic) subjectivity through [End Page 624] the objectification of women as passive, ignorant receptacles of the future citizens of empire. The first and third chapters aim to compare the rhetorical style of midwifery manuals with a corresponding literary form; Smellie's "hero-accoucher" draws from the picaresque and the romance, and Denman's "accoucher of feeling" borrows elements that characterize gentlemen heroes from domestic fiction. Published when the public viewed male midwives with suspicion and skepticism as effeminate, lecherous necrophiliacs, Smellie's Treatise attempted to remodel the accoucher as an honorable and expert practitioner fighting valiantly to preserve women's and children's lives. This chapter's close analysis of language in the Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1752-64) is effective; the sharp readings of the case studies—down to the nominative case—make concrete and comprehensible the thrill and pathos Smellie invokes to center himself...