Our second source is the Erreurs populaires, touchant la médecine & le régime de santé published in 1578 and written by Laurent Joubert (1529-1582), who became the Royal Physician to King Henry III of France a year later. His text was published in two volumes in French which preserve Joubert’s native Occitan, with colloquial words mixed in.

These volumes underwent numerous reprints which occasionally left out hundreds of pages and accrued drastic editing changes. There is evidence to suggest that Erreurs populaires was controversial at its time of publication.

The 16th century marks a point in medical history where women began to be treated less exclusively by midwives and for those who could afford the luxury, began to employ the services of male doctors. This meant that women were being brought into direct physical contact with male physicians who needed to be mindful of the need to dispute any claim to impropriety by the general reading public who were consuming these new depictions and representations of the female body.

The shift from Latin to the vernacular caters for this shift, as it expands the established market for medical textbooks and manuals. However, Joubert’s authorial intentions are less clear than other texts in our corpus. While some highlight their desire to share knowledge that the reader can apply themselves, Joubert seems to be presenting the ‘learned physician’ as the one source of infallible medical knowledge. While he may criticise women, Joubert’s audience does include women, who he hopes to persuade to choose the attentions of a doctor over a midwife, or at least a more intelligent one. Other male-authored texts, in contrast, acknowledge the large role of midwives in medical care of the female body.