Aborted Dreams and Contested Labors: The Société Royale de Médecine's 1786 Survey of Midwives

In 1786 Charles Alexandre de Calonne requested the addition of midwives to the Société Royale de Médecine's (SRM) national survey of medical practitioners, thereby broadening governmental and medical surveillance of childbirth. This essay explores the data-gathering practices for the midwives' survey in the generality of Soissons. It challenges the dominant Anglocentric narrative of man-midwives' usurpation of childbirth and, by highlighting local negotiations around midwifery expertise, provides a fruitful juxtaposition to the French, quantitative scholarship on the surveys. The methodologies of paper technology facilitate an excavation of the particular social vision for midwives embedded in the physical table itself. Attention to the paper trails of the survey recovers the hidden voices of midwives and birthing women. The SRM's attempts to derive universal knowledge from the survey responses masked heterogeneous notions of expertise and regional debates over midwifery education.