Self-mentioning: Authority, authorship or self-promotion in 17thC prefaces to manuals on obstetrics?

Abstract

Early Modern English texts on obstetrics have been a subject of study in the history of medicine and a source of a supposed antagonism between women midwives, on the one hand and surgeons and male midwives, on the other. Nevertheless, it can be questioned if sustaining this type of controversy was the main purpose of these works. This paper presents a discourse and pragmatic analysis of stance attribution in nine prefaces to obstetric books of mainly the 17th C. By paying attention to self-mentioning, the main objective is to determine if their writers (a) defended the authority of a professional community, (b) emphasized their individual contribution to the obstetrics bibliography, or (c) were basically interested in selling their books. Texts have been accessed in digitalized facsimile form and the pronoun counting has therefore been performed manually. The results obtained, illustrated and completed with examples, show there has been a misconception of “obstetric treatises” of the period, which in turn has obscured their basic purpose.