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

Abstract

Helen King, Professor of the History of Classical Medicine in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading, has contributed the latest volume to Ashgate's series “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.” Writing clearly and with infectious enthusiasm for her project, King seeks to answer four key questions in the history of medicine: 1) how did men midwives create a place for themselves in the medical marketplace; 2) what was the significance of men's ultimate “takeover” of childbirth; 3) who claimed authority over the female body after 1500; and 4) what was the changing relationship between midwifery and gynecology? Using as her touchstone the Gynaeciorum libri (books on the diseases of women), first published in 1566, King speculates as to why these particular texts were chosen to be collected together at that particular time. She notes that since the age of Hippocrates women had been considered so different from men and so difficult to treat that a separate branch of medicine was needed to minister to them. Women were “wetter” than men, fluid collecting in their bodies, in the womb specifically, which eventually was discharged as menstrual blood. In Hippocratic texts, writers presented menstruation as the “centre of what it is to be a woman.”