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Feature of the month - March
Wolveridge's Speculum Matricis
Image will open in a new window From John Lee Jardine's manuscript copy of Wolveridge's Speculum Matricis (1671) [PDF 150k]

James Wolveridge

At a meeting of the Obstetrical Society of London held in 1884 Dr JH Aveling reported that “The attempt of the Society to obtain a transcript of James Wolveridge’s work on Midwifery, Dublin, 1670, had failed, the man whom Dr. Fordyce Barker had employed to copy the book having absconded with the volume and died in Europe.

By this loss of the only known copy of Wolveridge’s work it is feared the earliest original work on Midwifery in the English language has been irretrievably lost.”

A report in the British Medical Journal of 1st March 1884 gives the full, and curious, story of the loss of this volume which was entitled Speculum Matricis and was published, contrary to Aveling, in London in 1671.

Dr Fordyce Barker owned a copy of the book and undertook to find someone able to make a manuscript copy of it for the library of the Obstetrical Society. He consulted an antiquarian bookdealer who recommended the services of Emile Bourgeaud, “an eccentric Frenchman, who lived in constant penury, but was a good copyist, much employed by collectors in New York, London, Paris, and Rome.”

Bourgeaud agreed to make a copy of Speculum Matricis but Barker was unable to get him to name a fee for this commission. Bourgeaud took the book away with him and Barker lost sight of him for some time until, in April 1881, Bourgeaud returned with the book only partly copied.

“Starvation had evidently prevented him from completing his task.” Barker agreed to allow Bourgeaud time to finish copying the book but then received a letter from Bourgeaud to say that he had accepted a commission from the Emperor of Brazil to do some work for the Imperial Library but that he hoped to be back in New York in November 1881 with the Wolveridge book completely copied. That was the last that Barker ever heard from Bourgeaud.

Determined to track down the book, Barker contacted the United States Legation at Rio de Janeiro who confirmed that Bourgeaud had been working at the Imperial Library and, despite the high standard of his work, “he had never asked for any remuneration.”

Further investigations revealed that a steamer sailing from Rio in November 1881 carried among its passengers someone listed as “A. Boojo.” Rightly surmising that this was a phonetic transcription of Bourgeaud, Barker discovered that, on landing at New York, Bourgeaud, by then in very poor health, had been befriended by the ship’s cook, a Frenchman named Quinquinet, and was taken by him “to a low French tavern in Worcester Street.”

Barker learned from the landlady of this establishment that Bourgeaud “brought with him a box, and asked for ink, but used to sit still in his room doing nothing.” Eventually his bill was paid by a friend (possibly Quinquinet) who took him and his trunk away. Barker never saw the book or Emile Bourgeaud again.

Happily, the Obstetrical Society did eventually acquire two manuscript copies of Wolveridge’s Speculum Matricis, the full story of which is recounted in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 1927; Vol. 20: 1080-1086. HR Spencer. Wolveridge’s Speculum Matricis (1671), with notes on two MS. copies in the Society’s library.

The full text of this article is now available online [PDF 1.1Mb].

The Obstetrical Society of London merged with the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1907 to become the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, bringing with them a collection of 15,000 volumes including the Wolveridge manuscripts which are now held in the RSM Library.

Bibliography

James Wolveridge. Speculum matricis; or, the expert midwives handmaid.
London, 1671.
Royal Society of Medicine Library. Manuscript MSS. 298

James Wolveridge. Speculum matricis; or, the expert midwives handmaid.
London, 1671.
Royal Society of Medicine Library. Manuscript MSS. 299

The lost medical work.
British Medical Journal 1884; Vol. 1: 426.

HR Spencer. Wolveridge’s Speculum Matricis (1671), with notes on two MS. copies in the Society’s library.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 1927; Vol. 20: 1080-1086.

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