Abstract Summary
When Descartes equated animals with machines in Discourse on Method (1637), he did not anticipate that he opened the door to mechanical materialists. While very few adopted radical mechanism, mechanistic conceptions of the human body nonetheless manifested in many arenas in early modern Europe, including automata, anatomical models, images, mannequins, and instruments. In this panel, we pursue this thread of the “human machine” within the field of obstetrics through four instrument-based case studies, from the newly invented forceps and pelvimeter of the eighteenth century to craniotomy scissors in the nineteenth and, finally, to its transformation into physiological birthing machines in the twentieth. Transnational in its approach, our panel explores examples from France to Germany and Brazil. Broadly, we investigate the theory, practices, and social relations that produce specific obstetrical instruments in a variety of spaces. We shift focus away from theoretical conceptions of the reproductive body and objects to how these objects were enacted in practice in different situations. In doing so, we demonstrate the instability of objects and the reproductive body. This approach requires paying particular attention to the practices producing and surrounding these objects. Each paper, therefore, centers on an obstetrical object in order to interrogate its instability and entanglement with the reproductive body in different contexts. These papers follow a long scholarly tradition of recognizing childbirth as a site of reproduction of wider socio-political contestations around gender, class, and imperialism in order to uncover their role in shaping the fragile identities of these objects.
Self-Designated Keywords :
instruments, medicine, obstetrics, gender, body
