Pregnancy and Pathology: Picturing Childbirth in Eighteenth-Century Obstetric Atlases

Abstract

This essay focuses on two eighteenth-century obstetric atlases published by William Smellie and William Hunter. Combining images of anatomical dissection and midwifery, these atlases medicalized childbirth in unprecedented ways. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault argued that the clinical method was founded on a descriptive technique that, when combined with pathological anatomy, became essentially a medical aesthetic. A similar aesthetic animates Hunter's and Smellie's atlases, transforming the epistemological link between the female body and pregnancy. Picturing childbirth as an illness rather than a domestic process, the engravings favor a pathological over a normative viewpoint.