Louise (Bourgeois) Boursier (1563–1636) was royal midwife at the court of King Henry IV of France and the first female author in that country to publish a medical text.
[1] Largely self-taught, she delivered babies for and offered obstetrical and gynecological services to Parisian women of all social classes before coming to serve Queen Marie de Medicis in 1601.
In 1609, Bourgeois published the first of three successive volumes on obstetrics: Observations diverses sur la sterilité, perte de fruict, foecondite, accouchements et maladies des femmes et enfants nouveaux naiz / Amplement traictees et heureusement praticquees par L. Bourgeois dite Boursier (Diverse observations on sterility, miscarriage, fertility childbirth, and diseases of women and newborn children amply treated and successfully practiced).
These publications include observation-based, innovative obstetrical protocols to manage difficult births as well as advice for pregnant and postpartum mothers and newborns.
The three volumes include over four dozen detailed case histories that made a substantial contribution to the emerging empiricism of seventeenth-century European science and medicine.
[6] Moreover, Bourgeois envisioned a collaborative rather than hierarchical relationship among trained midwives, surgeons, and physicians, one that would serve the best interests of mother and child.
Her work is reflected in Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered (1671); Marguerite du Tertre de la Marche's Instruction familière et utile aux sages-femmes pour bien pratiquer les accouchemens (1677); and Justine Siegemund's Die chur-Brandeburgische Hoff-Wehe-Mutter (1690).
She was paid 900 livres for each of the last four of Louis XIII's siblings' births, a sum eight times greater than the average municipal midwife's salary.
[15] The couple had a comfortable life until the dynastic and religious wars that had wracked France for over thirty years came to the quiet suburb.
Bourgeois wrote that to make ends meet she sold the furniture and other objects she had salvaged from her home as well as items she had embroidered.
… In the end … fear of seeing my children go hungry made me do it.”[20] Unlike the majority of practicing midwives, Bourgeois did not learn midwifery by apprenticing to a more experienced midwife nor does she acknowledge that her husband instructed her.
Paré also emphasized the importance of learning human anatomy by performing dissections, a part of medical and surgical training to which most midwives never had access.
Impressed with her calm demeanor and upright stance—characteristics that in Bourgeois’s era connoted moral and physical strength,[37] the queen declared that she wanted no other midwife to ever touch her.
These volumes comprise numerous genres: medical treatise, autobiography, history, poetry—to extol her supporters and lambast her enemies[39]—and parental advice.
[42] Few texts with such practical information on obstetrics and maternal care directed to women existed at the time, let alone ones written in a female voice.
[44] The essay outlines religious and moral guidance regarding such topics as abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and female modesty; it also describes how a midwife might avoid being blamed for unsuccessful deliveries.
The second volume includes, in addition, “How I Learned the Art of Midwifery”—a brief autobiographical sketch that has become source material for almost all secondary accounts of Bourgeois’s life.
[45] Bourgeois’s narrative of the birth of the future Louis XIII displays her knowledge of and playful attitude toward the critical importance that the Bourbon royals placed in having a male heir.
In her dramatization of his birth, Bourgeois exhibited a carnivalesque interpretation of this key event by implying that she could control the sex of the unborn child just before its delivery, a commonly held notion of her era.
[47] She went on to claim that she set Henri IV on an emotional roller coaster by not revealing the child’s sex immediately after it was born.
[48] She created narrative tension by describing at length how distraught the king and his courtiers were—until Bourgeois unveiled the naked child.
… I have the honor that no other woman except for me has touched the queen during her deliveries and afterwards.”[51] These narratives provide a unique account of royal births that emphasize not only Bourgeois’s obstetrical prowess but also her perspective on the court’s internal workings at a critical moment in French history.
[54] The third volume, published in 1626, was the briefest; it contains case histories that emphasize the importance of orally transmitted knowledge, and Bourgeois wrote of her growing concern about incompetent physicians who advise women without really understanding the signs of or other aspects of pregnancy.
[55] The published report intimated that Bourgeois was to blame for the death, which was believed to have been caused by retained pieces of the placenta found in the uterus.
[57] She highlighted her many qualifications; cited her practice as a midwife for thirty-four years; and noted that she had honorably acquired the proper license and had written books on midwifery that were used by physicians in England and Germany.
Even if small pieces of placenta remained, she insisted, they would have been flushed out by the lochia as the ancient Greek surgeon Paulus Aeginata and her own contemporary, the anatomist Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente (1565–1613), had discussed in their writings.
Her reluctance to publish stemmed from her concern about including recipes for certain remedies that she had been keeping secret in order to pass them on to her daughter, Antoinette, who was also a midwife.
The publisher wrote, “The only thing that kept her from bowing to my prayers for a long time was the consideration of her daughter, who had embraced her profession, which she feared to harm.
Finally recognizing that she had acquired by her skill and great judgment, such a reputation, that she [her daughter] was henceforth quite recommendable in herself, without her needing to be so by her mother’s secrets, gave me this manuscript.”[61] Bourgeois died on 20 December 1636.
“Translation, Gender, and Early Modern Midwifery: Louise Bourgeois’s Observations diverses and The Compleat Midwife’s Practice.” New England Journal of History 65, no.