‘What Does the Eye Have to Do with Obstetrics?’: Obstetrical Machines and the Instruction of Touch in Late Eighteenth-Century Italy
By: Jennifer Kosmin, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Bucknell Unviersity
My discussion takes the commission of an elaborate and life-like obstetrical machine for Pavia’s newly opened midwifery school 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, this essay focuses on the cultivation of touch as an authoritative and professionalized source of bodily knowledge. This article argues that the Pavia 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-contextualized 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.
Jennifer F. Kosmin is Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University (Pennsylvania, USA) since 2015. 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. Her book, Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries (Routledge, 2020) explores the negotiations over birthing knowledge and authority that took place in the context of new state-sponsored public midwifery schools and the emergence of public maternity wards in Italy during the eighteenth century.