During my time at the Center, I will be working eighteenth century midwifery books and the textual materialization of the female body in medicine. Science and medicine are often thought of as having some basis in indisputable fact. In reality, those “facts” are constructed and contested, but often only behind the closed doors of “the Faculty,” as respectable, licensed physicians were called in the 18 th century. Applying literary techniques to medical texts reveals the rhetorical strategies and fictions of medicine. My project seeks to understand midwifery guides as texts—as reading material, written for and consumed by, a public interested and invested in childbirth and generation. I explore not only how practitioners self-create in these texts, but also how they rhetorically construct the female body and female sexuality and agency (or lack thereof). D isplaying verbal and visual depictions of fragmented, passive maternal bodies that are subtly, and perhaps insidiously, sexualized, medical texts, both popular and technical, were consumed by a public that had reposed authority in learned medical men.