Content area
Full Text
In 1601, Marie de' Medici was pregnant with her first child. The baby was not, however, her husband's first child. Henri IV, king of France, had a mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrées, who had given birth to five of the king's children while in the care of a midwife named Madame Dupuis. The fourth was stillborn, and Gabrielle died in 1599, apparently from complications of eclampsia, though rumors flew that she had been poisoned. With his first marriage to Margaret of Valois annulled by the Pope and his beloved mistress dead, the king married Marie in 1600, and he wanted Madame Dupuis to deliver the baby. The queen, however, wanted her own midwife. She chose Louise Bourgeois Boursier (Perkins 1996).
Boursier, the new royal midwife, attended the queen at the births of all six of her children. Between 1601 and 1610, Marie de' Medici gave birth to Louis XIII, the future king of France; Elizabeth, the future queen of Spain; Christine, the future duchess of Savoy; Nicholas Henri, the future duke of Orléans (who died young); Gaston, the future duke of Orléans; and Henrietta Maria, the future queen of England, wife of Charles I. When Boursier wasn't busy attending the queen for a month before and a month after each of the births of her children, the midwife was busy in Paris, helping rich and poor families alike in childbirth.
As a wife and mother, as well as a midwife, Boursier invested in her husband's work and her children's education. Her husband, Martin Boursier, was a barber-surgeon. The two of them were married on December 30, 1584, and together they had at least three children: Antoinette became a midwife and married a physician; Françoise married a physician as well; a son became a "pharmicien" (or apothecary). This later led Louise Boursier to observe, in her advice-book on the midwife's role in society, Instruction à ma fille: "Le corps de la medecine est entier dans nostre maison!" ("The body of medicine is complete in our house!") (Boursier 2000, 124). Boursiers grandchildren and great-grandchildren also served in the medical field.
Boursiers knowledge of midwifery was eventually inherited by her descendent, Madame Angélique le Boursier du Coudray, who, beginning in 1759, served as the royally appointed midwife-educator of Enlightenment France...