Abrégé de l’art des accouchements
| Title | Abrégé de l’art des accouchemens, dans lequel on donne les préceptes nécessaires pour le mettre heureusement en pratique |
|---|---|
| Contributor(s) |
Le Boursier du Coudray, Angélique Marguerite
(author) |
| Year | 1759, 1769, 1785 |
This is a visualisation taken from Voyant Tools which shows the most common words and concerns of this text and how it pertains to the female body. Du Coudray was a midwife; so this text offers insights into the world of childbirth in France; we see words like ‘l’accouchement’ {childbirth} ‘douleurs’ {pain}, ‘matrice’ {womb}. The child (‘l’enfant’) is also prominent in du Coudray’s content.
Context of the Text
The final source that we consider is from the famed midwife, Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray (1715-1794). It was towards the latter half of the century that du Coudray, midwife under the French monarchs Louis XV and Louis XVI, wrote Abrégé de l’art des accouchements in 1759. An itinerant midwife, she operated between urban centres between 1759-1783, employing a mechanicalized mannequin of the female body to complement the theory of her lectures. She taught and trained other women in midwifery best practices to enable them to better care for pregnant and birthing women, accelerating the move away from more traditional and often rural customs.
This diagram depicts the types of connections that are made in this text between the three keywords in blue. The process of childbirth can be pieced together, where the physical female body is very present. The dangers of childbirth are also present, with ‘mort’ (death) being used in connection with the ‘enfant’ (child).
Consult the 1759 source
Consult the 1789 source
Sources
Gallica hosts the first edition of the original 1759 publication, and they also offer a .txt file for download, which we used for the visualisations for this source. We were able to consult the 1769 edition in person with the support of the municipal library of Besançon. We used the 1785 edition hosted by Google Books which served as the source for our .txt data file.
