Looking at the casebooks kept by the early modern astrologer-physician Richard Napier, this article offers a close reading of cases in which he linked his patients’ ‘madness’ to their recent childbearing. Exploring this linkage, it engages with a longstanding historiographical debate about the relationship of culture, corporeality, and subjective embodiment. Napier’s ideas about childbirth-related mental ill health were profoundly gendered, and we cannot begin to understand them without studying the early modern gendering of planets, seasons, flesh, and blood. Contemporaries’ constructions of sex difference, in particular, underline the distance between their phenomenology of bodies and our own. Yet reading the case histories of these patients can give rise to impressions of familiarity, as well as strangeness. The article asks how historians should interpret the parallels between present-day understandings of childbirth-related health risks and those described in early modern England. It argues that we need to develop historical methodologies which allow room for both culture and the ‘extra-cultural’, even if we cannot separate out the two for scrutiny.

中文翻译：

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历史上的分娩、“疯狂”和身体

查看早期现代占星家兼医生理查德·纳皮尔保存的案例手册，本文仔细阅读了他将患者的“疯狂”与他们最近的生育联系起来的案例。探索这种联系，它参与了关于文化、肉体和主观体现之间关系的长期历史学辩论。纳皮尔关于与分娩有关的精神疾病的观点是深刻的性别化的，如果不研究行星、季节、肉体和血液的早期现代性别化，我们就无法开始理解它们。尤其是同时代人对性别差异的建构，强调了他们的身体现象学与我们自己的身体现象学之间的距离。然而，阅读这些患者的病历可能会产生熟悉和陌生的印象。这篇文章询问历史学家应该如何解释当今对分娩相关健康风险的理解与现代早期英格兰所描述的理解之间的相似之处。它认为我们需要发展为文化和“外文化”留出空间的历史方法论，即使我们不能将两者分开进行审查。