Lisa Forman Cody's Books

Birthing the Nation

Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons

By: Lisa Forman Cody

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Birthing the Nation

Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons

By: Lisa Forman Cody

Birthing the Nation analyses two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British state, and the emergence of the man-midwife as the pre-eminent authority over sex and childbirth. By exploring peculiar episodes in the history of the reproductive body and the body politic, from stories of pregnant men to rumours that a midwife had foisted a 'suppositious' child on the nation as the Prince of Wales, this original andprovocative work proposes how national, religious, ethnic, and gendered identities were experienced through and symbolized by birth and midwifery.

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376

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Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199268649

ISBN 13

9780199268641

Birthing the Nation

Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons

By: Lisa Forman Cody

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Birthing the Nation

Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons

By: Lisa Forman Cody

How could the professional triumph of man-midwifery and contemporary tales of pregnant men, rabbit-breeding mothers, and meddling midwives in eighteenth-century Britain help construct the emergence of modern corporate and individual identities? By uncovering long-lost tales and artefacts about sexuality, birth, and popular culture, Lisa Forman Cody argues that Enlightenment Britons understood themselves and their relationship to others through their experiences and beliefs about the reproductive body. Birthing the Nation traces two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British nation, and the emergence of the male expert as the pre-eminent authority over matters of sexual behaviour, reproduction, and childbirth. By taking seriously contemporary caricatures, jokes, and rumours that used gender, birth, and family to make claims about religious, ethnic and national identity, Cody illuminates an entirely new view of the eighteenth-century public sphere as focused on the bodily and the bizarre. In a monarchy arbitrated by its official religion, regulation of reproduction and childbirth was vital to the very stability of British political authority and the coherence of British culture, challenged as it was by Catholicism, the French Revolution, and social change. In the late seventeenth century, the English feared the power of female midwives to control the destiny of the royal family, yet men-midwives and male experts had hardly proved their superiority to manage the successful birth of children. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, male midwives became experts over the domestic world of pregnancy and childbirth, largely replacing female midwives among the middling and elite families. Cody suggests that these new professionals provided a new model for masculine comportment and emergent intimate relationships within the middle-class and elite home. Most surprisingly, Cody has discovered many interconnections between obstetrics and politics, and shows how male experts transformed what had once been the private, feminine domain of birth and midwifery into topics of public importance and universal interest, leading even Adam Smith and Edmund Burke to attend lectures on obstetrical anatomy. This is the first book to place the eighteenth-century shift from female midwives to male midwives as the dominant experts over childbirth in a larger cultural and political context. Cody illuminates how eighteenth-century Britons understood and symbolized political, national, and religious affiliation through the experiences of the body, sex, and birth. In turn, she takes seriously how the political arguments and rhetoric of the age were not always made on disembodied, rational terms, but instead referenced deep cultural beliefs about gender, reproduction, and the family.

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376

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191514977

ISBN 13

9780191514975

Writings on Medicine

Printed Writings 1641–1700: Series II, Part One, Volume 4

By: Lisa Forman Cody

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Writings on Medicine

Printed Writings 1641–1700: Series II, Part One, Volume 4

By: Lisa Forman Cody

The four works in this volume are the only known exclusively medical texts written by women during the Restoration. Their importance is denoted by their dramatic challenge to the generalisations once made about medical practice and female healers in this period. Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book was the first and only midwifery manual to be printed in English before 1700, and continued to be influential into the early eighteenth century. The principal focus of Elizabeth Cellier's To Dr.--- (1688) is the attempt to legitimate the notion of a female corporation of midwives through historical precedent. To Dr.--- was in fact borne out of a previously unpublished effort, 'A Scheme for the Foundation of a Royal Hospital', sent to James II in 1687. In the document, Cellier outlined a specific scheme for training female midwives and supporting poor, pregnant women and abandoned children. Mary Trye began practising 'chymical physic' at her father's side in London in 1663. Her only known work, Medicatrix, was published in 1675. Trye claimed female medical authorship to be unique, in that women observed nature truly and administered genuine medical solutions to the sick. The writings of Sharp, Cellier and Trye have helped to overturn historians' assumptions about a woman's role in medicine and healing. These texts reveal their female authors to be as learned in the humanities and sciences as they were in medical matters.

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632

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351870734

ISBN 13

9781351870733

Writings on Medicine

Printed Writings 1641–1700: Series II, Part One, Volume 4

By: Lisa Forman Cody

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Writings on Medicine

Printed Writings 1641–1700: Series II, Part One, Volume 4

By: Lisa Forman Cody

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

632

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351870734

ISBN 13

9781351870733

Book's by Lisa Forman Cody

Birthing the Nation

Birthing the Nation

Birthing the Nation

Birthing the Nation

Writings on Medicine

Writings on Medicine

Writings on Medicine

Writings on Medicine

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