1509

French midwife Louise Bourgeois publishes her text on ob/gyn: Titled Diverse Observations on Sterility, Miscarriage, Fertility, Childbirth, and Diseases of Women and Newborn Children, Bourgeois claimed that her broad experience lent authority to her clinical observations. After giving birth to her own children, she learned her craft studying the works of Ambrose Paré and her husband, himself an army surgeon and student of Paré. As midwife to pregnant Queen Marie de Medici, she was the most influential midwife of her generation, and the first to expound her medical practices and knowledge in French and in print (Broomhall, loc 802-807).