ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rewriting Pathological Childbirth: Marie-Louise Lachapelle and the Revision of Obstetrical Nomenclature at the Turn of the 19th Century

• In Event: Decentralizing Women’s Medicine: Plural Voices Describing Female Bodies in the Long Early Modern Period

English Abstract

At the turn of the 19th century, the Parisian midwife Marie-Louise Lachapelle (1769-1821) occupied a unique position of authority in French obstetrics. As chief midwife and teacher of midwifery, she presided over the Maternité de Port-Royal, one of Europe’s most important maternity wards and training institutions. Working alongside the renowned surgeon-obstetrician Baudelocque - with whom she shared mutual professional respect and collaborated in clinical practice - Lachapelle developed a distinctive vision of obstetrical knowledge. In her Pratique des accouchements (1821), Lachapelle engaged critically with Baudelocque’s widely influential textbooks and undertook a systematic revision of his obstetrical nomenclature, which she deemed “dogmatic”, impractical and misleading.
This paper examines how Lachapelle’s work represents an important moment in the negotiation between different forms of knowledge about the female body. Her rewriting of obstetrical categories was not only technical but also epistemological: advocating for a more practical nomenclature that prioritized clinical utility over theoretical complexity, it reasserted the primacy of empirical observation and decision-making rooted in midwifery practice over zealous speculation, and challenged gendered hierarchies of medical authority.
By analyzing this collaborative yet critical relationship, this paper investigates the contested terrain on which knowledge about female bodies was produced and legitimised, complicating the dichotomies between “male medicine” and “female knowledge”, and revealing instead a space of dialogue, critique and mutual influence across gendered professional boundaries.

Author

• Elena Danieli