Title Authority, gender, and midwifery in early modern Italy : contested deliveries / Jennifer F. Kosmin

Published Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021 ©2021

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 224 pages) : illustrations Series The history of medicine in context History of medicine in context. Contents Cover -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Midwives, medicine, and religion -- The Church's interest -- Baptism and the soul -- Marriage, sexuality, and the courts -- Childbirth, the sacred, and the Inquisition -- Ordering the early modern medical marketplace -- The impact and limits of legislation -- Conclusion -- 2 Textual deliveries: reading early modern obstetrical treatises -- The masculine origins of early modern midwifery manuals An Italian midwifery manual? Scipione Mercurio's La Comare o Raccoglitrice (1596) -- Eighteenth-century obstetrical texts and the emergence of a professional discourse -- Theological embryology and the cesarean operation -- Conclusion -- 3 The origins of public maternity care in Northern Italy -- The maternity hospital as institution -- "Those young women who imprudently lose their honor": Maternity care in Turin -- Protecting honor, disciplining sexuality: Maternity wards in a longer frame -- Daily life in an eighteenth-century maternity ward -- Conclusion 4 Midwifery education and the politics of reproduction -- Populationism and pronatalism -- A school for midwives -- Recruitment -- Curriculum -- Expectations and realities -- Resistance and repercussions -- Conclusion -- 5 Surgical instruction and the clinicalization of the maternity ward -- Surgeons learn the trade -- Obstetrical machines and the instruction of touch -- Critiques of simulation -- The maternity ward becomes a clinic -- Conclusion -- 6 Contested deliveries -- Clients, communities, and conflict -- Midwives and surgeons -- Interprofessional rivalries Between church and state: the case of Marianna Boi -- Conclusion -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index Summary Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Medical writers in this period devoted countless pages to investigating the secrets of women's sexuality and the processes of generation. By the eighteenth century, male practitioners in Britain and France were even successfully advancing careers as male midwives. Yet, female midwives continued to manage the vast majority of all early modern births. An examination of developments in Italy, where male practitioners never made successful inroads into childbirth, brings into focus the complex social, religious, and political contexts that shaped the management of reproduction in early modern Europe. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy argues that new institutional spaces to care for pregnant women and educate midwives in Italy during the eighteenth century were not strictly medical developments but rather socio-political responses both to long standing concerns about honor, shame, and illegitimacy, and contemporary unease about population growth and productivity. In so doing, this book complicates our understanding of such sites, situating them within a longer genealogy of institutional spaces in Italy aimed at regulating sexual morality and protecting female honor. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of medicine, religious history, social history, and Early Modern Italy Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Jennifer F. Kosmin is Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, USA. Her research focuses on the intersections of the history of medicine, gender history, the history of the body, and the popular display and study of anatomy in eighteenth-century Italy Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 20, 2020) Subject Midwifery -- Italy -- History Midwives -- Italy -- History Childbirth -- Religious aspects. Childbirth -- Political aspects -- Italy -- History Midwifery Parturition. History, Early Modern 1451-1600. HISTORY -- Europe -- Italy. HISTORY -- Modern -- 18th Century. Childbirth -- Political aspects. Childbirth -- Religious aspects. Midwifery. Midwives. SUBJECT Italy. https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D007558 Subject Italy. Genre/Form Electronic books History. Form Electronic book ISBN 9781000174663 1000174662 9781000174601 1000174603 9781003056072 1003056075 9781000174632 1000174638

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