Popularising midwifery and obstetrics in Martha Mears' "Pupil of Nature" (1797)

Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, major sociocultural changes affected the domain of medicine as an area of expertise and praxis and paved the way for new modes of constructing and disseminating knowledge which dramatically differed from the medieval, scholastic, logocentric science derived from Galen, Hippocrates, and other ancient writers (Patha and Taavitsainen 2011). The popularisation of medicine also involved linguistic changes, which naturally need to be contextualised according to such criteria as time, place, the role of speakers/hearers or writers/readers, purpose, and the prevailing scientific ideologies (or thought-styles) of the time. Within this area, midwifery and obstetrics manuals seem to occupy a significant niche which perfectly exemplifies this process; this paper proposes an analysis of Martha Mears’ Pupil of Nature, or, Candid Advice to the Fair Sex (1797) and of the (linguistic) popularisation strategies used by the author in order to render the discipline more accessible to the (new) female audience. Mears’ sensible approach to the subject of pregnancy and childbirth was aimed at creating an alternative public sphere in which women practitioners stood at the threshold between domesticity and state and served their duty both to mothers and the community (Forman Cody 1999), in spite of the prevailing ideologies of the time and the gendered disputes between them and the so-called “men-midwives” (Fife 2004). The manual will be compared to William Smellie’s Treatise on Midwifery (1752), which is generally acknowledged among the foregrounding works on obstetrics, and the study will highlight how differences in contexts, actors, readership, language (e.g. the use of Latin and/or the “vernacular” English; technical vocabulary; repetition; metaphors, etc.) can be accounted for as displays of the ongoing developments in the popularisation of science in late eighteenth-century Britain.