Stripped Down to Bare Bones: Navigating the Pelvis in Enlightenment France

Eighteenth-century birthing manuals presented the maternal body as an obstructive factor in natural childbirth. This impulse is best exemplified in visual culture, wherein infant delivery is often reduced to bare bones: the oft ill-fated interactions between maternal pelvis and fetal skull. The tendency to pictorially disembody the mother reflected on a new approach to childbirth that pathologized the pelvic passageway in ways that paved the way for surgical intervention. In this disciplinary reconceptualization, the pelvic parts were assigned the role of a faulty mechanism in the ‘woman machine’ that must be fixed through tools like forceps, which promised to safeguard delivery in cases of infant malpresentation. This paper argues that the rationalization of the pelvic passageway built on a navigational vocabulary that revealed surgical interest in colonizing the female body by way of the explorer. Obstetrical 'atlases,' not unlike contemporary cartographic ones, mapped the female body using such navigational terms as pelvic inlet, delta, and birth canal. This terminology provided a new paradigm for exploring the female body as a kind of ‘terra incognita’ that was matched by visuals of the pelvis, often in grid form, which charted her anatomy in terms of oceans and landmasses. Both forms of mapping relied on the development of new tools—for obstetricians, the pelvimeter quantified the pelvis, while for navigators, the marine chronometer measured longitude at sea. In both cases, the aim was to create a universal lexicon and iconography by which obstetricians, as cartographers, could map bodies in communicable ways.