1764

Late births, debate over in France: Parisian medical experts summoned to court to determine possibility of late births, i.e., births that occurred well beyond the nine months of normal pregnancy. The legal issue was one of inheritance, i.e., whether a late birth was legitimate and inheritance could pass on to the child. The case of Charles and Renee that launched the debate concerned a birth claimed to have occurred 10 months, 17 days after conception, and two months after the death of 76-year-old Charles. The case originated in Brittany but quickly gained an audience in Paris and the provinces. Jurists emphasized the social significance of a ruling, whereas the Encyclopedists “saw in the debate the beginning of a salutary effort to establish a new science of medical jurisprudence.” For the medical experts, the focus was primarily epistemological, challenging them “to refine its criteria for perceiving truth and to develop a truly enlightened science of medicine” (L. Wilson, loc 247-250). Medical men who believed in the physical impossibility of late births (e.g., Antoine Louis) believed in an absolute Nature in which “all that was fortuitous or anomalous might be possible, but it was not natural, and it thus lay outside the scope of medical doctrine or practice.” Physicians (e.g., Antoine Petit) who accepted the possibility of late births “believed that the scientific conception of what was natural had to be expanded to encompass the extraordinary as well as the commonplace in nature.” Late birth may have been an aberration from the normal, but not necessarily from the natural, order of things.” This approach was in keeping with the skeptical empiricism of both Voltaire and Diderot, who believed that it could lead to precious therapeutic knowledge” (L. Wilson, loc 342-347).