Robert Boyle reconsidered

are apt to instill their principles into the mindes of weake persons, and you well know, if your wife got anything into her Head, all the reason in the World will not persuade her out of it." There is much sophisticated analysis to admire that positions midwives into larger historical debates. South German cities, such as Nuremberg, Augsburg and Munich, controlled their midwives through "sworn women" usually of the respectable and wellto-do classes who attested to their morality and skill. Although some control came to be exerted by physicians and clergymen (also in the Italian states), the midwives up to the end of the eighteenth century retained their public personas and so contradict the general thesis that women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were losing their public presence as public and private domains became increasingly split along male and female lines. Again, in the discussion of Braunschweig midwives in the second half of the eighteenth century the sociological definition of professionalization which has bedevilled a proper understanding of pre-nineteenth century medicine is by-passed by focusing on the quotidian concerns that allowed the midwives to view themselves as members of a professional group. This volume is also enlivened by a series of pen portraits of midwives. One chapter looks at the enigma of the political midwife Elizabeth Cellier whose Catholic sympathies enraged London pamphleteers and whose character as heroine or muddled villainess shows how easily the office of midwife could merge with matters of state. Mme du Coudray in contrast is clearly a heroine, sent to spread the gospel of good midwifery practice throughout France. Her travels and tribulations are refreshingly retold in the best heroichistorical vein without a trace of the cynical interpretation so viciously prevalent in modern biographical history. Perhaps the most important message of this volume is of the centrality of the midwife not only for worried parents or for a king like Louis XV anxious about the depopulation of France. Midwives were seen as upholders and witnesses of moral and legal norms. They gave expert evidence on infanticide and whether the birth was premature or stillborn. They squeezed the breasts of women suspected of hiding their pregnancy and birth for evidence of milk. And in the midst of labour the midwife was expected to interrogate an unmarried woman as to the identity of the father. Perhaps the midwife was so well integrated in society that she also served its coercive purposes.