ABSTRACT
Mme du Coudray was a most extraordinary Frenchwoman of the eighteenth century (born 1715, died 1794), a midwife pensioned by two successive kings to travel throughout the realm teaching illiterate peasant women how to deliver babies safely. Several things make her remarkable: that she functioned as a kind of royal ambassadress on a mandated mission, first for Louis XV, then for Louis XVI; that she spent twenty-five years on this arduous ambulatory teaching expedition, traveling by carriage, overcoming constant obstacles, and giving her course in more than forty cities, thus training between 5,000 and 10,000 young women to become “sages-femmes”; that she produced an illustrated textbook on delivery, thus entering the almost exclusively male world of medical print culture and claiming the right to see in the totally male world of the “medical gaze”; that she used original, life-size obstetrical models of her own invention for demonstrations, hundreds of which were made by her and distributed in the regions where she taught; and that, in an unprecedented inversion of the social and medico-political order, she instructed male surgeons in the art of childbirth, male disciple-demonstrators who would perpetuate her teachings by giving refresher courses on her mannequins in each region after her departure (Plate 22.1).
