Though male doctors gained prominence at the bedsides of pregnant mothers in nineteenth-century Europe, the clinical training they received in medical academies remained cursory. In France, to supplement the medical faculties, the government set up schools for both health officers and midwives which were meant to teach practical obstetrics. This paper focusses on the city of Arras, where these two groups of students competed for the limited numbers of pregnant patients on which to practice their future professions. Like many in their field, two prominent instructors in Arras at each end of the century promoted male obstetrical education over female, arguing that practical education for health officers would lead to safer births for mothers and infants. By the 1870s, the obstetrics instructor adopted germ theory, tying improved hygiene and thus mortality rates to male students’ access to hospitalised patients. Despite their arguments, in Arras, the male students never gained priority in clinical obstetrical training, which midwifery students kept. To keep male students out of maternity wards, local administrators used fears that gender mixing would lead to immoral acts or thoughts. In doing so, they protected the traditional system of midwifery rather than invest in more costly male medical education. Championing midwifery students’ rights to the spaces and bodies needed for their education, however, delayed adoption of hygiene and antiseptic practices that led to lower maternal mortality. Unable to adapt to changing requirements by the state, the medical school closed in 1883, while the midwifery programme thrived until the 1960s.

This article is drawn from a doctoral thesis called ‘Governing Public Bodies: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Statecraft and Healthcare in England, 1650–1730’, which considers two things: how certain categories of person, certain subjectivities, have been assembled through government in the name of health; and how the health of the individual has been understood to relate to that of the collective.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a group of doctors under the banner of the social hygiene movement set out on what seemed an improbable mission: to convince American men that they did not need sex. This was in part a response to venereal disease. Persuading young men to adopt the standard of sexual discipline demanded of women was the key to preserving the health of the nation from the ravages of syphilis and gonorrhoea. But their campaign ran up against the doctrine of male sexual necessity, a doctrine well established in medical thought and an article of faith for many patients. Initially, social hygienists succeeded in rallying much of the medical community. But this success was followed by a series of setbacks. Significant dissent remained within the profession. Even more alarmingly, behavioural studies proved that many men simply were not listening. The attempt to repudiate the doctrine of male sexual necessity showed the ambition of Progressive-era doctors, but also their powerlessness in the face of entrenched beliefs about the linkage in men between sex, health and success.