Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the portraits of seventeenth-century French accoucheurs [men-midwives] that regularly appeared as the first plate in their obstetrical treatises, representing the body from which the text had issued. It argues that these visual documents were forms of strategic display in keeping with the wider goals of the treatises--to present their authors as cultivated, skilled, and vastly experienced experts in childbirth. At a time when the visual evaluation of character was commonplace within medical and other contexts, author portraits presented the public image of accoucheurs. Before analysing the idealized images of men-midwives. however, the article explores the author portrait of Louise Bourgeois, royal midwife to Queen Marie de Médicis from 1601-9, and the first French woman to write obstetrical treatises. Bourgeois is portrayed not only as an exceptional practitioner granted royal favour, but also as a hybrid figure whose identity fluctuated between efficient female midwife and educated theoretical writer. Portraits of accoucheurs represent the unstable identity and rather flexible 'masculinity' of male practitioners who likewise blurred gendered categories. Some images identify male practitioners exclusively with theoretical knowledge, while others associate them more directly with the maternal qualities traditionally admired in female midwives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".