A late eighteenth-century “birthing phantom.” Unlike Smellie’s machine, these were not intended to be exactly like the living body, but rather a basic replica allowing midwives to understand the position of the child in the birth canal.
By permission of the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum
Illustrated lecture with Dr. Brandy Schillace
Date: Thursday, November 21
Admission: $8
Time: 8:00 PM
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Known by a variety of names—“this most curious machine,” “this mock woman,” and the “celebrated Apparatus” —Dr. William Smellie’s mechanized obstetrical phantom was both science and spectacle in the eighteenth century. Strangely, however, though crucial to the training of at least 900 man-midwives in ten years, the machine disappears from both the actual and rhetorical “scene” of 18th-century obstetrical science.
This illustrated talk will explore the mitigating factors contributing to the machine’s disappearance. Why was such a valuable teaching tool auctioned to the public after Smellie’s death? Why did famed obstetrician William Hunter agree to sell his own copy of the machine to Dr. Foster of the Dublin Rotunda? And why—after so much popular debate—does the machine disappear from public notice by the latter part of the century? Dr. Schillace will also document her own rather circuitous journey of discovery, that is, the necessary labor of unearthing (if not birthing) a medical artifact’s unusual history.
Dr. Brandy Schillace is an interdisciplinary, medical-humanist scholar. She writes about cultural production, history of science, and intersections of medicine and literature. She is the managing editor of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, an international journal of cross-cultural health research and a guest curator and blogger for the Dittrick Medical History Museum. Dr. Schillace was the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of the Archivists and Librarians in the History of Health Sciences 2013, and is the recent recipient of the Chawton House Library Fellowship (for study of 18th century women writers) and the Wood Institute travel grant from the Philadelphia College of Physicians. She has also an edited book collection under contingent contract with Cambria Press: Birthing the Monster of Tomorrow: Unnatural Reproductions. For a selection of recently published work, please visit http://fictionreboot-dailydose.com/publications-and-press.