090116 SE Midwifery and the Classics (2014S)

The focus of this course will be midwifery and childbirth, in terms of the acrimonious professional debates across history on the proper gender for those assisting women giving birth. Two periods will be studied in detail: ancient Greece and Rome, and the eighteenth century. These have been selected because of the ways in which "men-midwives" in the latter period drew on classical texts to authorise their takeover of normal births; from their comments on the Roman goddess Lucina as able to assist even in difficult births, to their rewriting of the Latin story of the ancient "first midwife" Agnodike, to their claims for Hippocrates as "Father of Gynaecology" or even "Father of Midwifery". The course will focus on key texts (all in translation), including for the classical period the Hippocratic On the Excision of the Foetus, Pliny's and Galen's use of midwives and other women as sources of authority, and Soranus' Gynaecology aimed at the Roman head of household. These will be supported by case studies of individual midwives and men-midwives who later drew on the classical tradition in different ways to support their work. Famous representations of the midwife, including the claims of Plato's Socrates to be "midwife of the soul", will be re-examined through the history of their uses in real professional debates in later history. A key aspect of this course will be the "reception loop"; the methodology by which the later uses of classical texts can then lead us to ask new questions about the classical world itself.