ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Cellier lived and worked in London, in the latter years of her practice during the 1670s and 1680s in the parish of St Clement Danes. There are enormous difficulties in studying her life and work; her interests and publications straddle the two fields of midwifery and politics, but the evidence is almost entirely centred on two periods of political unrest. In the first, 1678-81, the Popish Plot and its aftermath, her role was primarily political; in the second, 1687-88, in the months before the Glorious Revolution, she issued detailed proposals for a college of midwifery. For each period, allegations have been made that she was not responsible for the ideas which circulated under her name: contemporaries claimed that the astrologer Gadbury, or unnamed Jesuits, wrote her political broadsheets, while it has been suggested that the prime mover behind the college of midwives was one of the Chamberlen family of obstetricians, who used Cellier as a front because midwives would only unite behind another midwife.1
