Morgan Tunzelmann
Morgan Tunzelmann is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Her research focuses on medicine and aesthetics in eighteenth-century culture. She is also a member of a multidisciplinary research project entitled City Life and Well-Being: The Greyzone of Health and Illness, funded by the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), which studies the relationship between established conceptions of health and day-to-day collective social practices of urban life.
During my time at the Countway I will be focusing most of my attention on the library’s resources in obstetrics, particularly illustrated encyclopedias, obstetrical instruments and papier-mâché anatomical models. My project has contextual grounding in the debates occurring in eighteenth-century Britain over the influx of educated male physicians into the traditionally female profession of midwifery. For example, in her 1760 book A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery, Elizabeth Nihell criticizes “men-midwives’” use of obstetrical instruments, asserting that the tactile knowledge midwives possess, as well as the more gentle touch of a female hand, better serves women in childbirth than does the man-midwife’s forceps.
While I do not intend to proscribe specific genders upon visual and tactile ways of knowing, the conflict between the two sensory processes nonetheless informs my line of inquiry. I am interested in how the aesthetic elements or art theories that inform the anatomical “model” (whether two-dimensional illustration or three-dimensional replica of the body) function to construct a tradition of authoritative empiricism, which of course privileges the sense of vision. These art theories may differ. Anatomical figures in William Cowper’s work, like many figures in the scientific genre, often imitate the poses depicted in paintings on the Old Masters; but other physicians such as obstetrician William Hunter formed their own theories on proper methods of illustrating the human body—drawing exactly what one sees in as much detail as possible, in one sitting—that function as aesthetic methods for displaying scientific information. I believe that studying these obstetrical texts provides an opportunity to elaborate on the implications that these anatomical illustrations have for the construction of the pregnant female subject, as well as the subjectivity of the patient in general within a growing medial establishment.