Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait

Louise Bourgeois (1563-1636): royal midwife of France.

Louise Bourgeois was the first practicing midwife to write of her experience of childbirth and of women's problems. She did much to enhance the respect in which her craft was held. For 26 years she was midwife to the royal court.

Midwifery and medicine in early modern France: Louise Bourgeois

Flanders and served that most Catholic of rulers, Charles V, is not mentioned, although Colombo is given counter-reformation Catholic beliefs because he served the Pope, and Fabricius' religious views are deduced from his friendship with Sarpi and his membership of the Venetian intellectual elite. To his credit, Cunningham is honest in his admission of the theory's weaknesses. He allows that Co...

Portrait of an optimist

I come from a family of lawyers. When I was growing up, the only scientist in the family was my uncle, who was a physicist. But I was interested in science, and as a boy collected rocks and kept my “chemistry cabinet” in a spare room at my father’s law firm in Rome where I smelled up the place from time to time with failed experiments. When I finished high school at the Liceo Classico Torquato ...

The Birth of Bourgeois Punishment

Portrait

Born in 1944, I grew up in a world in which polio was both a gripping fear and real threat. Then in a matter of a few years-polio was eradicated by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. Later I learned that Salk's efforts were built on pioneering work of many others, including John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins (Nobelists, 1954), and David Bodian, who pioneered studies of polio patho...