Obstetrical forceps loom large in the history of midwifery as the explanatory mechanism for the emergence of routine male attendance on uncomplicated labors. The forceps, however, were a dynamic object that underwent constant modifications, with incongruous versions often coexisting. In 1751 celebrated man-midwife André Levret (1703–1780) published a new design of the forceps with a pelvic curve, developed from measurements of pelvic proportions. He initiated a geometric conception of childbirth based on planes and angles that remains in use today. Levret succinctly summarized his conception of childbirth as “a natural operation, truly mechanical and susceptible to geometric demonstration.”[1] This theoretical conception of the female body materialized in his curved forceps. Scrutinizing Levret’s books, memoires, images, and an annotated student copy of Levret’s textbook, this paper focuses on sociomaterial practices around his forceps to explore the confluence of Levret’s medical practices, his curved forceps, and the birthing bodies of women. Finally, the paper follows Levret’s forceps as they circulated around France, eventually finding their way into midwifery courses for provincial women. While the curved forceps developed from a particular, mechanistic conception of the birthing body, this theoretical perspective did not necessarily travel with it. My account also challenges the gendered, progressive narrative of the history of the forceps by demonstrating the indefinite path of invention and complicating the association of the forceps exclusively with men. [1] André Levret, L'art Des Accouchemens, Démontré Par Des Principes De Physique Et De Méchanique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Chez p Fr Didot le jeune, 1766), 86.

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.

This paper focuses on the use of craniotomy in the exhausting and long labor of the imperial heiress of Brazil, Isabel de Bragança, in 1875. It analyzes the arguments around the use of this technique using as its main source the medical report of that event (1876). Obstetricians performed the craniotomy technique with the Smellie scissors, created by English obstetrician William Smellie in the 18th-century, for use in cases of either a restricted pelvis or an excessively voluminous fetal skull. These scissors decreased the volume of the fetal skull by removing the cerebral mass. The decision to conduct the craniotomy on such a high-ranking woman caused controversy in the Brazilian medical world. Most medical literature understood craniotomy as a procedure more dangerous than forceps because it caused fetal death. Disagreement over the use of craniotomy showed that, while this technique ensured maternal survival, it also led to the inevitable mutilation of the fetus and damage of the maternal perineum. For these reasons, the procedure was considered to be inherently violent. This paper argues that a tension remains between having knowledge of a technical resource and the use of it. Technical resources, even when deemed violent by medical opinion, were nonetheless used when necessary.

Since the eighteenth century, childbirth in Western medicine has been understood as a mechanical procedure consisting of a regular sequence of foetal movements through the mother’s womb. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the reasons for these movements were not yet understood. What kind of mechanical and expulsive forces were at work in the birthing process? At the turn of the twentieth century, German obstetrician Hugo Sellheim (1871–1936) embarked upon a research project to answer this question by exploring the laws of birth mechanics. For his experimental studies, he designed new research tools, so-called “birthing machines”. In contrast to older obstetrical machines, these “machines” performed the birth process not along anatomical lines but, rather, simulated it from a strictly functional-mechanical perspective. The paper argues that studying these machines offers an excellent lens to examine the epistemic shifts that obstetrics underwent in the early twentieth century, when it moved from an anatomical to a physiological paradigm, leaving the focus on the pelvis-skull ratio behind, instead studying the impact of mechanical laws on soft tissues and its flexibility. Sellheim aimed at establishing a norm, a standard procedure of delivery based on experimental, scientific knowledge that also captured all of its possible deviations, turning treatments from improvised and experience-based interventions into standards based on scientific norms. I analyze Sellheim’s experimental system from a material-semiotics perspective to show how these objects and epistemic shifts more generally were always entangled in practices imbued with gender and class politics.

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.