Marie Anne Victoire Boivin

French midwife

• Born: April 9, 1773
• Birthplace: Montreuil, France
• Died: May 16, 1841
• Place of death: Paris, France

Boivin was one of the leading midwives and female medical researchers in nineteenth century France. She wrote extensively on gynecological diseases and invented the Boivin bivalve vaginal speculum.

Primary field: Medicine and medical technology

Primary invention: Bivalve vaginal speculum

Early Life

Marie Anne Victoire Boivin (mah-ree ahn veek-twahr bwah-van), née Gillain (zhee-lan), was born in 1773 in Montreuil, an eastern suburb of Paris. She received her early education in the arts and sciences from the nuns of the Visitation of Marie Leszczyńska. After the French Revolution broke out in 1789, the sixteen-year-old lived with and studied under an order of nursing nuns in Étampes, roughly thirty miles southwest of Paris. Through a hospital surgeon, Gillain learned about midwifery and anatomy. She lived and worked in Étampes for eight years, gaining much valuable medical knowledge.

In 1797, the twenty-four-year-old Gillain returned to her family’s home in Montreuil. Later that year, she married Louis Boivin, who worked as an assistant in the Bureau of National Domains. Their marriage was to be brief: By the end of 1798, she was left a widow with an infant daughter.

Putting her medical education to work, Boivin sought a position at the Hospice de la Maternité in Paris. This free, government-sponsored maternity facility, recently established in a former abbey, was a teaching hospital that provided care to poor and unwed mothers. The Maternité took Boivin on as a student midwife. There she became an assistant to the midwife in chief and head of practical teaching, Marie-Louise Dugès LaChapelle (today regarded as the mother of modern obstetrics). The Maternité awarded Boivin a diploma in midwifery in 1800.

Life’s Work

After graduating, Boivin worked for a short time as a midwife in Versailles. When her young daughter died in an accident, Boivin ended her independent practice and returned to Paris and the Maternité, where she became supervisor in chief.

Over the next decade, Boivin’s talents grew and flourished at the Maternité. She worked alongside LaChapelle, who was also widowed and supporting herself, and whose obstetrical knowledge was vast. (LaChapelle had assisted her midwife mother as a child, been married to and learned from a surgeon, and studied in Germany, which was renowned for the quality of training afforded its female physicians and midwives.) The Maternité appears to have been a comparatively positive environment for female physicians. The prominent obstetrician heading the Maternité, Jean Louis August Baudelocque, was committed to providing midwives with a quality education, and he was not above respecting or acknowledging the abilities of female colleagues. That said, he ignored LaChapelle’s and Boivin’s opinions regarding the contagion hazard posed by having large groups of onlookers present during births and his liberal use of forceps and other instruments to extract the baby from the birth canal.

In 1812, at the urging of Maternité physician in chief François Chaussier, Boivin published Mémorial de l’art des accouchemens, a reference book for midwives, which included more than a hundred of her careful illustrations of the fetus in the uterus. The book was in great demand in France and abroad; by 1824, it was in its third edition. However, Boivin’s position at the Maternité was terminated around the time of the book’s initial publication. Historians have suggested that she and the Maternité parted ways because LaChapelle or male colleagues were jealous of her success.

Boivin went on to become codirector of the general hospital at Seine-et-Oise in 1814. That year, her work was recognized by King Frederick William III of Prussia, who awarded her the Order of Civic Merit. In 1815, she assumed the directorship of a temporary military medical hospital. She later headed the maternity hospital in Bordeaux and the Maison Royale de Santé. In 1818, she translated two important English works on uterine hemorrhage and wrote a comprehensive review of the literature on the subject. Her own book on hemorrhages of the uterus, Memoire sur les hemorrhagies internes de l’uterus, won an open competition in 1819 held by the Medical Society of Paris. (The society selected her book as the winner under the mistaken assumption that the author was male.)

In 1827, she published Nouvelles Recherches sur l’origine, la nature et le traitement de la môle vésiculaire ou grossesse hydatique, her original research into the hydatidiform mole, a sometime malignant condition in which an abnormal fertilized egg or placental overgrowth mimics pregnancy. Also in that year, the University of Marburg in Prussia conferred upon her the honorary degree of doctor of medicine. The following year, she received a commendation from the Royal Society of Medicine in Bordeaux for her research into miscarriage.

In 1833, she published her most important work, Traité pratique des maladies de l’uterus et des annexes. This two-volume treatise on diseases of the uterus listed as its coauthor Antoine Dugès, LaChapelle’s nephew and a professor of medicine at Montpellier. The book included the first recorded observation of urethral cancer in a woman. Modern for its time, the treatise was widely used as a textbook in France and beyond. It was translated into English the year after its first printing in France.

Boivin introduced several innovations to the practice of gynecology and obstetrics. After René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec invented the stethoscope in 1816, Boivin was one of the first to employ it to monitor the fetal heartbeat. She used the vaginal speculum (at the time, a long-neglected instrument experiencing a resurgence) not for obstetrics but for checking the health of the cervix. She also designed gynecological instruments, notably a bivalve vaginal speculum (1825) that was a forerunner of the ones used today, a fenestrated speculum (1836), and an “intropelvimeter” (1828), her improvement on the device commonly used for measuring the diameter of the pelvis. She was one of the first surgeons to excise a cancerous cervix.

During her career, Boivin turned down prestigious offers—including one from Catherine the Great of Russia—instead choosing to continue her work with indigent women. When she retired, she received an exceedingly small pension, reflecting a lifetime of low wages. She died in poverty in 1841 at the age of sixty-eight.

Impact

Boivin was one of many women of her time who gained a foothold in the traditionally male world of medicine through the traditionally female practice of midwifery. She was held in high esteem not only by other midwives but also by male colleagues. Guillaume Dupuytren, a well-known surgeon who asked Boivin to deliver his grandchild before her retirement, famously remarked that she worked as if she had eyes at the tips of her fingers. While some all-male professional organizations barred her from their ranks, she was a member of several other medical societies.

Unable to gain admission to mainstream French medical schools, Boivin nonetheless made and publicized important, original medical discoveries. Her use of a stethoscope in obstetric monitoring has become commonplace, as has the employment of a bivalve speculum for vaginal examinations. Hygienic practices she and LaChapelle advocated have also become routine in modern medicine.

Boivin advanced the fields of gynecology and obstetrics, improving the lives and health of women and their babies. Thanks to her many publications, Boivin had an impact on the midwives of her generation and the next, in her own country and beyond. Her influence even reached the New World: Marie Durocher, midwife to the imperial family of Brazil, relied heavily on Boivin’s texts.

Bibliography

Burton, June K. Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law, 1799-1815. Fashioning the Eighteenth Century series. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. Chapter 4, “The First National System of Midwifery Education,” discusses the Hospice de la Maternité, and a section is devoted to Boivin and her mentor LaChapelle. Illustrations include a portrait of Boivin and a drawing from her classic treatise on uterine disorders. Notes, glossary, chronology of primary sources, index.

Gould, Vivian. Daughters of Time: 2000 Notable Women—Antiquity to 1800. North Charleston, S.C.: BookSurge, 2005. The profile of Boivin includes a chronological listing of her publications and medical achievements. An index helps set Boivin in the context of her relationships with other notable women of her day.

Hellerstein, Erna Olafson, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen. Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth Century England, France, and the United States. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981. In chapter 45, two brief but enlightening passages translated from Boivin’s Mémorial de l’art des accouchemens provide insight into Boivin’s attitudes regarding the suffering of her patients and the excessive use of instruments in the birth process.

Shearer, Benjamin F., and Barbara Smith Shearer, eds. Notable Women in the Life Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. A thorough biography of Boivin includes her accomplishments as a medical professional, commentary from her contemporaries, and a list of her life’s milestones. Notes, bibliography, index.

Wilbur, C. Keith. Antique Medical Instruments. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 2008. A hand-illustrated historical guide depicts vaginal specula designed by Boivin and others. Evolution of the instrument from its earliest known use is discussed in detail. Illustrations, index.