--- title: "Angélique du Coudray built a life-size birthing mannequin and taught about 4,000 French midwives herself" url: https://badiyaa.com/angelique-du-coudray-midwife-birthing-mannequin/ published: 2026-11-15T06:40:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-15T06:40:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Angélique du Coudray built a life-size birthing mannequin and taught about 4,000 French midwives herself Angélique du Coudray, Louis XV's midwife, built a life-size birthing mannequin and trained about 4,000 women across rural France from 1760 to 1783. In the 1750s a Paris midwife stitched together a full-size model of a woman’s pelvis and a newborn out of fabric, leather and stuffing, sometimes with real human bones inside, and then carried it across France. Angélique du Coudray called it simply “the Machine.” With it she trained about 4,000 women herself, at a time when men were pushing women out of the profession. This is a story about the history of teaching, not medical guidance. ## The Machine, piece by piece Each model cost roughly 300 livres to make. Strings and straps let the soft body stretch the way a birth canal does during labor. The baby’s head had a shaped nose, stitched ears, ink-drawn hair and an open mouth with a tongue, deep enough to take a finger about 5 centimeters (2 inches). That detail mattered: in a breech birth, a midwife would place two fingers in the baby’s mouth to help guide the head out. Credit for the first birthing mannequin often goes to the Scottish man-midwife William Smellie. But a French royal warrant dated October 19, 1759, already describes du Coudray’s model, which gives her a prior claim. Rouen’s Flaubert museum of medical history keeps a historical example, and Paris’s Musée de l’Homme shows a copy. ## A woman in a field men were taking over Du Coudray was born in August 1714, probably in Paris. (A few sources give 1712.) She finished a three-year apprenticeship and passed her exams at the Paris School of Surgery in February 1740, aged 25. Within a few years, surgeons, who were all men, began refusing to teach female midwives. Du Coudray signed petitions against the ban and argued that badly trained midwives would harm patients. The doctors kept women in the classroom, and she went on to become head midwife at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris. In 1759 two things happened at once. She published her textbook, the *Abrégé de l’art des accouchements*, later translated into German, Dutch and English. And King Louis XV commissioned her to teach rural women, because officials feared that deaths among newborns, on top of losses in the Seven Years’ War, were draining France of future citizens. The Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University notes she was paid 8,000 livres a year, a salary on par with a decorated general. ## Two months, six days a week From 1760 to 1783 she traveled across rural France and taught in more than 40 towns and cities. A typical course lasted about two months, running all morning and all afternoon, six days a week. Students paid 36 to 40 livres, certificate included. At her first lesson in Moulins in 1761, 80 women showed up; at the second, 70, because the harvest kept others in the fields. Here is how her reach added up, using the figures recorded for her career: - About 4,000 women trained by du Coudray herself - About 6,000 more trained by her former students - About 500 male surgeons and physicians That is roughly 10,500 people in the direct and second-hand chain, before counting veterinarians she taught in Lyon. By 1780, according to the Dittrick center, two-thirds of the midwives in France had been her pupils. She also changed a grim habit. Midwives had often set aside a newborn who seemed close to death and focused on the mother. Du Coudray taught them to try to revive the baby instead. She died in Bordeaux on April 17, 1794, during the Terror that followed the French Revolution. Her ties to the king have led some scholars to suspect she was killed; others think she died of old age. Her name is now heading somewhere very public. In 2026 Paris announced her as one of 72 women whose names are proposed to join the 72 men already engraved on the Eiffel Tower. For more forgotten women in science and the 18th century, see our stories on [chemist Clarice Phelps and element 117](https://badiyaa.com/clarice-phelps-element-117-plaque/) and [Helena Slicher’s 1759 wedding dress](https://badiyaa.com/helena-slicher-wedding-dress-rijksmuseum-panniers/), from the same year du Coudray got her royal commission. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Angélique du Coudray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ang%C3%A9lique_du_Coudray) - [Dittrick Medical History Center: Madame du Coudray](https://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/2013/08/07/madame-du-coudray-a-midwife-in-a-mans-world/) *Image: Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*