(Re)producing Reproduction: Obstetrical Training Models and Methods, 1880–1900

This article presents a close look at the material and visual culture of obstetrical training in the late nineteenth-century North Atlantic world, focusing on the obstetrical machines employed in contemporary midwifery courses. Created during a time of growing interest in public health, widespread anxiety over rising infant mortality, and emerging pronatalist policies, these widely produced pedagogical objects provided an interactive, mechanistic, and process-oriented simulacrum of the birthing body. By the late nineteenth century, obstetrical machines, once purpose-built by individual midwives, were mass-produced using durable commercial materials. This article focuses on the Budin-Pinard manikin, a widely used obstetrical manikin designed in France by renowned obstetricians Pierre Budin and Adolphe Pinard, to illustrate that objects used in obstetrical teaching in this period sought to provide a consistent structure, and through that a framework of method and of practice, within which the unexpected could be accommodated, managed, and made to signify.