BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIENCE, NARRATIVE AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN FRENCH MEDICINE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Ophélie Marceline Chavaroche December 2017 © 2017 Ophélie Marceline Chavaroche BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIENCE, NARRATIVE AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN FRENCH MEDICINE Ophélie Marceline Chavaroche, Ph.D Cornell University 2017 My dissertation aims to reconstruct a genealogy of medical writing in the early modern period that foregrounds experiential knowledge and makes room for women as well as sick and non-normative bodies. In literary studies, it traces the trajectory of first-person narratives in medical writings and treatises as they move from iterations of self-care to demonstrations of self-fashioning. It also expands our understanding of early modern autobiographical writing beyond the borders of the literary canon by unearthing new archives of the self in medical discourse. In medical humanities, it refreshes the perspective on the establishment of medical authority by foregrounding rhetorical negotiations in rarely explored archives. In gender studies, it showcases women’s efforts to protect and maintain the uniqueness of fundamental practices such as touching and caring for pain. By paying close attention to a plurality of representations of experience-based medical knowledge, this project demonstrates the co-existence of various ethics of medicine and underlines how emerging male-midwives endeavored to appropriate iii traditionally female practices in order to rewrite them as male in their dominant discourse on the body. iv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Ophélie Chavaroche completed her Ph.D in French Literature at Cornell University. She previously studied at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she received her BA in Comparative Literature, and at Université Paris VIII, where she earned her MA in Gender Studies. She is currently teaching at Sciences Po Paris. v To the loving memory of my grandfather vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has been made possible by the support of family, friends, colleagues, mentors and teachers, and I am glad to have the opportunity to thank them all here. First of all, I would like to thank all three members of my wonderful committee for their guidance, their passion and the countless hours they spent discussing every possible aspect of my project with me. Kathleen Long’s knowledge and scholarly generosity is unrivaled, and her constant celebration of the Renaissance convinced me to devote my time and energy to the early modern period. Marie-Claire Vallois’s extraordinary talent for literary analysis repeatedly and fruitfully led me to refine my own arguments. Jenny Mann’s wealth of insights and critical mind inspired me to get out of my comfort zone and push my intellectual boundaries. I would also like to express my gratitude to Anne Emmanuelle Berger for being such an excellent mentor at the Centre d’Etudes Féminines of Paris VIII and for encouraging me to pursue graduate work at Cornell. Several of the following chapters received helpful criticisms when I presented them at conferences in France and in the United States. I am especially grateful to Valerie Worth-Stylianou, Stephanie O’Hara, Alison Klairmont Lingo, Jacques Gélis and all the members of the SIEFAR (Société d’Etudes des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime) for their invaluable feedback on my work on Louise Bourgeois. I would also like to thank Holly Tucker for her contagious enthusiasm and advice on writing, Stephanie Hilger for her careful readings of Chapter 4, and Rafael Mandressi for welcoming me to his seminar on the history of the body at the EHESS. vii Three chapters were partially published in edited volumes and I would like to thank their editors for their comments and suggestions. An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 1 appeared in French as “‘La vaine chose que c’est que la medecine.’ Logiques de Soin dans le Journal de Voyage de Montaigne” in Dire les Maux: Littérature et Maladie (ed. Pascale Antolin and Marie-Lise Paoli, Pessac, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de l’Aquitaine 2015.) A version of Chapter 2 appeared in French as “Toucher le corps des femmes au XVIIe siècle: empirisme, soin et savoir dans les écrits médicaux de Louise Bourgeois dite Boursier” in Enfanter Dans La France d'Ancien Régime (ed. Laetitia Dion, Adeline Gargam, Nathalie Grande and Marie-Elisabeth Henneau, Presses Universitaires d’Artois, 2017.) A version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Midwives and Spin Doctors. The Rhetoric of Authority in Early Modern French Medicine” in New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies (ed. Stephanie Hilger, Palgrave MacMillan 2017.) This project also benefited from research funds from the Michele Sicca Grant, the Tinker Grant, and numerous Graduate School Travel Grants. A very special word of gratitude is due to the “Cornell Dames”: Mariam Wassif’s careful reading through every draft of this project has been truly invaluable, while Jennie Row’s gift for critical thinking, Diana Garvin’s strength and Julie Désangles’s generosity have been constant sources of inspiration. I would also like to thank Emily and David LaGuardia, as well as Julie Pilorget, Clément Girardi, Hélène Thiérard, Anne-Laure Rigeade and Christophe Schuwey for their friendship, their passion and their continued support. viii At some point near the completion of this study of how the body’s interiority was made visible through language I found myself looking at the interior of my own body. I was lying on the operating table at Cayuga Medical Hospital and woke up, briefly, to catch a glance of a surgeon piercing holes into my radius with what looked like an instrument straight from Paré’s Livres de Chirurgie. It was not a pretty sight. I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to those who were there for me during this difficult period: Eddie Curran, Marilyn Migiel, Isaure Pisani- Ferry, Damien Tissot, and all my amazing Cornell students in my literature course on women writers. The last thanks are the most difficult to express. To my parents, Vincent and Roselyne, for instilling very early in me an intense love of reading and writing. To my wonderful sister, Margault, for our extraordinary connection. And, finally, to Andreas Karlsson, whose Swedish discipline and unflinching support gave me the strength I needed to finish this project, and to Juliette, who kept on asking me to tell her stories about the past, especially the ones starring strong, fierce and independent women. I offer them my love and gratitude. ix TABLE OF CONTENT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii TABLE OF CONTENTS x INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 – WRITING FROM THE BODY: 45 SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE IN MONTAIGNE’S TRAVEL JOURNAL CHAPTER 2 – TOUCHING AND CARING: EXPERIENTIAL 92 KNOWLEDGE AND GENDERED PRACTICES IN LOUISE BOURGEOIS’S OBSERVATIONS CHAPTER 3 – AN ‘I’ FOR AN EYE: VISUALITY AND THE 134 POLITICS OF CHILDBIRTH IN LOUISE BOURGEOIS’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS CHAPTER 4 – MIDWIVES AND SPIN DOCTORS: 195 THE RHETORIC OF AUTHORITY IN EARLY MODERN FRENCH TREATISES ON CHILDBIRTH CONCLUSION 237 REFERENCES 243 x INTRODUCTION The Fantasy of the ‘Speculum Matricis’ Critical of doctors who do not understand the illnesses afflicting our bodies, Montaigne presents the example of two men whose cadavers have been dissected in order to detect the origin of their ills, declaring: La chirurgie me semble beaucoup plus certaine, par ce qu'elle voit et manie ce qu'elle fait; il y a moins à conjecturer et à deviner, là où les medecins n'ont point de speculum matricis qui leur découvre nostre cerveau, nostre poulmon et nostre foye.1 Surgery seems to me much more certain, because it sees and feels what it is doing. There is less conjecture and guesswork in it, whereas the doctors have no speculum matricis to reveal to them our brain, our lungs, and our liver.2 The contrast Montaigne draws between medical practices based on experience and the senses, and conjectures based on applying theoretical knowledge, is 1 Michel de Montaigne, Essais. Ed. Villey-Saulnier, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965, 774. 2 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters. Trans. Donald Frame, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 712. 1 characteristic of the great epistemological crisis that had animated the Renaissance since anatomists undertook to open and study the interior of the human body. For Montaigne, surgeons’ anatomical knowledge undoubtedly superseded the bookish knowledge of physicians because it enabled touching and seeing a body that would otherwise remain unknowable. Here Montaigne conflates anatomists and surgeons because they held the knife that opened the body up and made its mysteries visible; meanwhile, physicians did not even employ the speculum, a tool that enabled entry into the depths of the body. In this passage, Montaigne expresses some of the tensions but also some of the fantasies proper to the new science of anatomy. In truth, he attributes to the speculum matricis a power it does not have: Montaigne borrows the term from the royal surgeon Ambroise Paré, whose work he admired, and in whose writings he found the illustration of this tool. At the end of his book on kidney stones, Paré explains that the speculum matricis had been used by one of his surgeon colleagues to operate on the renal colic of a woman, but that it normally served to “dilater le col de la vulve” [dilate the cervical opening of the vulva]3 in order to observe and touch the uterus of the woman during pregnancy. For Montaigne, however, the speculum matricis, meaning “matrix mirror,” became synonymous with a conduit giving visual and tactile access to any organ. More 3 Ambroise Paré, Dix Livres de la Chirurgie, Avec le Magasin des Instruments Nécessaires à Icelle, Paris: Jean Le Royer, 1564, 189.