Midwifery] Breve Compendio Dell'Arte Ostetricia.
UNRECORDED:
FIRST AND ONLY MIDWIFERY MANUAL
BY AN 18TH-CENTURY WOMAN IN ITALY
[Medical] Ployant, Teresa. Breve Compendio Dell’Arte Ostetricia. In Napoli, Presso Vincenzo
Orsino, con licenza de’ Superiori. 1787.
8vo.; pp. [iv], 105, [1] privilege; with attractive woodcut printer’s device on titlepage and
headpiece; titlepage and privilege leaf cropped close at both head and tail, with the whole work
cropped close at tail, in places just touching either the catchword or signature (notably pp. 5–25,
33–41, 59–63, and 67–77) but with no significant loss of text, lower outer corners of pp. 1–5
prominently frayed and worn, but again with no loss; title page a little browned and spotted with
old signature crossed out; paper-backed marbled boards; light wear.
Seemingly unrecorded first edition of this little known work, according to Hilary Marland and
Monica Green the first and only midwifery manual to be written by a woman in Italy during the
18th century. Ployant (fl. 1787-?), was in fact French, though worked as a Maestra of midwifery,
on the midwifery ward at the Incurables Hospital in Naples during the last thirty years of the 18th
century.
Following in the footsteps of Justine Siegemund and Barbara Widenmann in Germany, Louise
Bourgeois in France, and Jane Sharp in England, Ployant was one of few women in the medical
arts to pen a treatise specifically for the use of women. In the preface she declares that she has
written the book to encourage women to study “not as the occasion demands but methodically
and according to the principles proper to an art so necessary to the people” (p. 2), in order to
conserve this art for women. Her aim, simply, was to improve the standards of midwifery
practice, through better scientific knowledge, and in so doing win back a monopoly in the field
from the male doctors who were invading it. She urged women to go to midwifery school, and
saw the incursion of male-midwives, particularly in other European countries such as England
and France, as a “fatal turn of events” and so hoped that women “through untiring study [can]
make the public realise that we are the ones that can bring births to a happy outcome and at the
same time save women’s modesty” (p. 4).
See Hilary Marland, The Art of Midwifery in Europe, pp. 166-167; see Monica Green, Making
Women’s Medicine Masculine, p. 308; not in Blake, Cutter & Viets, Radcliffe, R.C.O.G. or
Wellcome; No copies of the this edition cited on OCLC; three copies only of the second edition
located at Yale, Stanford and Utrecht.
(#4657720)
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