Birth Figures

The first full study of “birth figures,” a set of illustrations which were widely reproduced in early modern books on childbirth and midwifery.

Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant uterus, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynaecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries in western Europe.

During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. By providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe.

Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practised, and how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.