Conference Program

This paper analyses the institutionalisation of obstetrics in the Papal States between 1786 and 1845, examining a case in which education, women’s work and female agency converged to produce an early and structurally democratic process of professional emancipation.

The research focuses on the history of the San Rocco delle partorienti e delle celate Hospital in Rome and draws upon primary sources preserved in the State Archives of Rome (ASR, University Fund, Envelopes 24-43-44-47-59-69-761-1083). It argues that the institutionalisation of the midwifery profession was fundamentally driven by a pedagogical challenge, one that ultimately reconfigured the social and epistemic conditions under which women could legitimately claim professional authority.

In 1786, Pasquale di Pietro, a consistorial lawyer, financed Professor Francesco Asdrubali’s trip to Paris, where Asdrubali trained at the school of Jean-Louis Baudelocque, author of L’art des accouchements (1781) and architect of a teaching method grounded in anatomical measurement and practical simulation using a mannequin. Asdrubali subsequently brought this method to Rome, together with a premise that was radical for the period: that obstetric knowledge could be taught, assessed and formally certified to women.

The Edict of Cardinal Camerlengo Carlo Rezzonico of 1786 established that female students were required to complete a full academic course (ASR, University Fund, Envelope 59, 1786) prior to practising professionally, thereby transforming the empirical transmission of knowledge characteristic of the mammane into a regulated public training programme. It was precisely through institutional access to scientific knowledge that women secured the right to practise midwifery legitimately. A silver medal awarded annually to the most distinguished student at San Rocco Hospital gave formal recognition to this important achievement.

Archival sources demonstrate that women were by no means passive recipients of this transformation: they were conscious and active agents within it. The licence registers document a wide and geographically diverse professional community, including Maria Antonelli (1815), Caterina Allini and Angiola Ansolmi (1816), Giulia Botti of Urbino and Teresa Bresciani of Macerata (1820), Bernardina Angeloni (1827), Lucia Altipimi, widow of Gentili of Tivoli (1831) and hundreds of others.

The annotation free appearing beside certain names is not a marginal detail: it constitutes evidence of a deliberate policy of inclusion, demonstrating that the Department of Obstetrics at San Rocco Hospital, responsible for issuing licences and administering training (ASR, University Fund, Envelopes 43, 44, 47, Licence Registers, 1815–1845), recognised the transformative potential of professionalisation with respect to class distinctions and social democratisation. Particularly eloquent is the handwritten petition in Envelope 1083, in which Anna Conti requests from Monsignor Filipponi the position of substitute midwife left vacant by Anna Maria Andreoli — not an appeal for charity, but the conscious exercise of an acquired right.

This paper contends that the professionalisation of the art of childbirth at San Rocco Hospital constitutes a genuine historical laboratory of female emancipation mediated by pedagogy, predating the major nineteenth-century movements for women’s rights. Restoring a name and a voice to each of these women contributes not only to the history of women, but to the history of education itself.