The fabric of life: microscopy in the seventeenth century

male medical writers deplored quacks, empirics and popular ignorance, but she could also write in her persona as a woman of the ignorance of male medical expertise. Perkins, who is an expert on French literature, has integrated into her account recent work of social historians on medicine: on the medical market place, on patient-doctor relations, especially between women and medical practitioners, and on the social construction of the body. She does so with skill and modesty, yet throughout the book there is an awareness "that Bourgeois-and others-were dealing with real clients who were often suffering and in need of assistance". The book gains from the dialectic interchange between the interpretation that views the practice of midwifery in terms of power relations, and one that sees Bourgeois' work, as she saw it, in terms of the alleviation of the intense suffering perceived to be involved in labour and of the safe management of a dangerous natural process. Bourgeois' relations with medical men are examined through the case histories and comments in her writings. Often appearing subservient to the opinions of the learned physicians, and certainly well able to speak their language, Bourgeois, nevertheless, at the bedside saw herself as an equal to surgeons and physicians when the practice of medical skills was involved. She boasted that the King "when in the presence of the four perhaps most learned doctors in France, he gave me pre-eminence, enjoining them not to have the Queen take anything if I did not agree with it, and to listen to my advice and follow it". She also made it clear that as a woman she had better and more appropriate skills than those of men to treat women's ills and to manage childbirth. Bourgeois was, in fact, expert both in the theory and in the practice of learned medicine. It is one of the merits of Perkins' book that the content of the learned theories on pregnancy are discussed and the remedies that were recommended are given some sense of coherence. Remedies are especially difficult for medical historians to write about, they are very numerous yet they also appear to stand alone outside any connected social and intellectual context and Perkins should be congratulated for writing intelligently about them. The death in childbirth of Marie de Bourbon-Montpensier, sister-in-law of Louis XIII in 1627 saw the end of Bourgeois' career at court. The autopsy report signed by …