Midwifery Anatomized: Vesalius, Dissection, and Reproductive Authority in Early Modern Italy

Although Vesalius, like his contemporaries, had only extremely limited opportunities to examine or dissect the human gravid uterus, it is the image of the anatomist laying bare the (un)pregnant female body and revealing its secrets that graces the title page of the 1543 edition of De humani corporis fabrica. This essay focuses on the implications of Vesalius’s and his followers’ anatomical discoveries for the practice and professional status of early modern Italian midwives. In particular, the essay focuses on three venues in which the authority to understand the female body and the processes of reproduction were contested. A close examination of the use of anatomy, both rhetorical and real, in the Fabrica, in male-authored midwifery manuals, and in the formal regulation of midwifery in seventeenth-century Italy reveals the ways in which authority and anatomy were contested in early modern debates over who could read and interpret the female body

Modelling Authority: Obstetrical Machines in the Instruction of Midwives and Surgeons in Eighteenth-Century Italy

This article takes the commission of an elaborate and life-like obstetrical machine by the Italian midwifery instructor, Vincenzo Malacarne, in 1791 as a starting point for considering the ways that medical practitioners were renegotiating the relationship between the senses at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, it focuses on the cultivation of touch as an authoritative and professionalised source of bodily knowledge. The article argues that Malacarne\u27s obstetrical machine reflects an important moment of transition in the way medical practitioners were trained to interact with female patients, in which the manual exploration of a woman’s genitals was re-contextualised as an expression of scientific rationality and medical authority. A close examination of the use of obstetrical machines in midwifery training suggests, moreover, that women, too, whose touch had often been accused of irrationality and ignorance, had to be taught how to perform manual procedures in a rational and scientific manner

Religious, Spiritual and Secular: The emergence of three distinct worldviews among American college students

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS IDENTIFICATION SURVEY. A Report based on the ARIS 2013 National College Student Surve