Blame and Vindication in the Early Modern Birthing Chamber
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Who was to blame when a labouring woman or her unborn child died during the early modern period? How was responsibility assessed, and who was charged with assessing it? To answer such questions, this article draws on French obstetrical treatises produced by male surgeons and female midwives between 1550 and 1730, focusing on descriptions of difficult deliveries. Sometimes the poor outcome of a labour was blamed on the pregnant woman herself, but more often a particular medical practitioner was implicated. Authors of obstetrical treatises were careful to assign fault when injuries or deaths occurred in cases concerning them. Chirurgiens accoucheurs (surgeon men-midwives) regularly accused female midwives of incompetence, yet also attacked fellow surgeons as well as those male physicians officially superior to them in the medical hierarchy. Female midwives similarly condemned the actions of male practitioners, without hesitating to censure other women when their mismanagement of deliveries had tragic consequences. Part of authors' eagerness to blame others stemmed from the fear of being held accountable for mistakes preceding practitioners had made. Ascribing responsibility usually went hand-in-hand with defensive claims of innocence, or boastful declarations of having saved a suffering woman from the bungling attempts of less skilled birth attendants.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it