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Madame du Coudray was both a mysterious woman and a powerful midwife educator in Enlightenment France. Little is known about her personal life, but a great deal is known about her professional life, due to her surviving correspondence with French officials and government documents relating to her mission to educate women to be midwives. In fact, over 1000 documents pertaining to her are still available and can be decoded to reveal her phenomenal contribution to midwifery in her time.
After working as a midwife herself in Paris in the 1740s and then in Clermont for an additional 10 years, she wrote a midwifery textbook, Abrégé de Vart des acouchements (1759). She invented a lifesize mannequin on which to demonstrate the birth process to her students, teaching them to reposition breech babies and then catch and care for them once they were born. Her book and her "machine," as she called it (the mannequin), apparently brought her to the attention of King Louis XV, who appointed her to be his official midwife educator to the nation in 1759. From then on, she had a mission to fulfill, and fulfill it she did, for she taught over 10,000 students throughout...