Bibliographic record
Abstract
Midwifery was a subject of both popular and scientific interest and often of regular scrutiny through the early modern period. While many births continued to be conducted by a local midwife, and family and religious rituals often remained constant, in other respects there were significant changes. However, their extent and the speed at which they affected different countries, even different regions, were extremely varied. The advent of print culture led to a sharp increase, from the 16th century onward, in the number of midwifery manuals available; those in the vernacular rather than Latin particularly found a wider, lay readership, especially when they contained descriptions and illustrations of “monstrous” births. Although most manuals were authored by male surgeons and physicians, in the 17th and 18th centuries some female midwives also kept detailed case notes and published textbooks. This contribution from women coincided in part with the rise of the male midwife, a phenomenon that challenged traditional midwifery, especially in England and France, and led to hotly contested debates over the use by male surgeons of the newly invented forceps, rather than relying on the skills of the expert female midwife. The period thus saw the emergence in some places of a medicalization of normal as well as complicated childbirth, and a potential diminution in the authority of the female midwife. Nonetheless, midwives, like surgeons and physicians, continued to be key members of the community, and midwifery was one of the limited number of remunerated, professional roles open to women. The regulation of midwifery varied by country and state/town, and was often a matter for both ecclesiastical and medical authorities: the former became critical after the Reformations because of the midwife’s potential role in baptizing the newborn. Although ecclesiastical licensing and medical regulations were undoubtedly sometimes more honored in the breach than in the observance, in some cities some formal training was provided for midwives. While the stereotypes of ignorant midwives and the associations of midwifery with witchcraft persisted in the popular imagination, by the 18th century Louis XV of France charged one midwife, Madame du Coudray (c. 1712–1794), with touring the provinces to teach midwifery skills in order to halt the decline in the population. In the cultural imagination, as well as in practice, the midwife remained a powerful if contested figure.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.142 | 0.069 |
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".