The obstetrician's armamentarium: historical obstetric instruments and their inventors

over the valuables of the plague stricken. Thus, the trial transcripts report that health workers targeted the homes of the wealthy for the spread of plague, that is, those homes where the pickings would prove the most profitable. The final chapter of Naphy's analysis branches beyond Geneva, investigating trials, council deliberations, and plague in the nearby cities of Lausanne, Lyons, and Milan. As with Geneva, accusations of plague-spreading centred on the medical and health professions, and profit, not witchcraft, appears as the root cause. As with Geneva, the trials show little evidence of scapegoats, or of stereotypical and supernatural causation. Unlike Geneva, the accused in Milan tended to be male instead of female, but the reasons had to do with the employment of those who cleared the homes of the plague dead and not with witchcraft or other sexual stereotypes. The most basic difference between Geneva and these other cities was in the numbers accused: in Geneva the conspiracies were more common with larger networks of the indicted. While Naphy's arguments are persuasive, he leaves a number of key questions unexamined: why did these plague-spreading conspiracies not erupt until the 1530s? Why did witchcraft take over as the main conspiracy in the plague of Geneva in 1571? Why did plaguespreading conspiracies largely cease as a major threat in Geneva after 1571? And why were these conspiracies more prevalent in sixteenth-century Geneva than elsewhere? It is to be hoped that Naphy's fine monograph will spark new enquiries into these and other questions, stimulating historians to analyse broad changes and interrelationships in the cultural and medical histories of late medieval and early modern Europe.