At Birth: The Modern State, Modern Medicine, and the Royal Midwife Louise Bourgeois in Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract

In this article I explore the connections between state cenhalization, the professionalization of healing, and the end of the royal midwife Louise Bourgeois' (1563-1636) illustnous career in seventeenth-century France. Specifically, 1 analyze seventeenth-century narratives of two events which frame Louise Bourgeois' public career as a writer and royal midwife in order to demonstrate the way that the changing meanings of childbirth and the role of the midwife in the medical hierarchy were bound up in state formation and consolidation. The result for midwives was that, though they could still practice, they were ultimately considered marginal to the medical community.