Modelling Authority: Obstetrical Machines, the Senses, and the Boundaries of Expertise

The public display of wax anatomical models in eighteenth-century Italy attracted Grand Tourists and was intended to contribute to the Enlightenment project of cultivating virtue and the public good. Not all anatomical models were destined for wide public consumption, however. This paper examines obstetrical machines used in the instruction of midwives and surgeons to demonstrate the distinctive concerns regarding authority and expertise they embodied. If anatomical models available for public display aimed at enlightening audiences with valuable knowledge about their own bodies, obstetrical machines and models incorporated into medical training functioned to demarcate boundaries of knowledge and render the female reproductive body necessary of management by those with a specialized medical knowledge. Obstetrical machines also became a site of negotiation regarding the nature of knowledge and the sources of expertise. While male practitioners interested in childbirth had typically emphasized their theoretical and anatomical knowledge to demonstrate their superiority to midwives, obstetrical machines encouraged the cultivation of touch as much as sight for the successful management of childbirth. In Bologna, the obstetrics instructor Giovanni Antonio Galli famously blindfolded his students before they practiced maneuvers on a machine. Critics, however, tended to focus on the machines’ lack of naturalism. Mechanically contracting uteri and fabric fetal dolls, they argued, could not mimic the true sensations of childbirth. This paper uses obstetrical machines as a lens through which to consider eighteenth-century debates on the boundaries of expertise, the importance of touch in medical practice, and the lines between nature and artifice.