Birth Figures by Rebecca Whiteley

Author:Rebecca Whiteley [Whiteley, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI000000 SCIENCE / General, SCI034000 SCIENCE / History, MED005000 MEDICAL / Anatomy, ART050010 ART / Subjects & Themes / Human Figure
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Valorized Hand

In the birth figures of the early midwife-authors, it was not just images of the touched body that served to characterize the midwife, but also images of the touching hand. The hand had always been, to some extent, the symbol of the midwife. From the earliest midwifery manuals, we find descriptions of the ideal midwife’s hand—Jacques Guillemeau, for instance, requiring “little hands & not thicke: cleane, and her nailes pared very neere, and even; neither must shee weare rings uppon her fingers, nor bracelets upon her armes, when shee is about her business.”53 When Guillemeau was writing, in the early seventeenth century, this ideal hand was female. As male authors began to present themselves as public servants and appropriate practitioners, they adopted this feminine ideal, adapting it to incorporate both physically and intellectually masculine attributes. Deventer, for instance, asserted that “nothing ever is more agreeable to the Art of Midwifery, than slender Hands, long Fingers and quick feeling.”54 Slender fingers and “quick feeling,” which implies both physical sensitivity and a mental quickness, are here intertwined. Indeed, more broadly in early modern culture, the hand stood for the low and the high in humans: base sense and manual labor, but also the controlling intellect.55 As Elizabeth Harvey has argued: “tactility, the fundamental sense, the sense contiguous with and essential to all animal life, which is especially pronounced in the vulnerable skin of human nakedness, is paradoxically differentiated from other animals through the concentration of touch in the apprehending and discerning hand. The hand stands for dominion not only over the other animals, but also over the potential for animality within human beings.”56 This understanding dated back to antiquity, to the writings of both Aristotle and Galen, who saw the hand as “the physical counterpart of the human psyche,” suited not just to particular tasks, but versatile, able to employ various tools and to address “an unrestricted range of subjects.”57 And, of course, according to Galen and many in the seventeenth century who read and followed him, the hand in its special capacities was also the ideal exemplum of God’s creative dominion.58 It was this association of the hand with the superiority of humans over animals, this connection between physical abilities and intellectual agency, sanctioned by God’s design, that the new midwife-authors brought to the older physical ideal of slimness.

The operative hands in the birth figures of Mauriceau, Viardel, Siegemund, and Deventer exemplify the complexity of this rhetoric, and particularly the difficulties of reconciling masculine and feminine ideal attributes. Though the rhetoric itself was deeply concerned with gender, it was employed in very similar ways by both men and women. Male authors tended to assimilate traditionally feminine qualities such as small, delicate fingers and soft skin with masculine strength and rationality. Female authors did much the same in reverse, claiming the traditionally masculine attributes of strength and intellectual capability for themselves.

In the birth figures of this period, therefore, we find a unique and curiously androgynous representation of the operative hand.

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