In the last decade the history of eighteenth-century anatomical collections has become the object of increasing scholarly interest. Yet, midwifery collections have received comparatively little attention. This paper focuses on the midwifery collection gathered in Bologna by the surgeon Gian Antonio Galli (1708–1782). Galli’s collection consisted of an impressive sequence of about two hundred models in wax, clay and glass. Placing three-dimensional anatomical visualisations at the centre of midwifery training, it included specimens of the pelvis, waxworks that displayed the anatomy of the parts of generation, and dozens of models in clay of the gravid uterus presenting the unborn child in a multiplicity of situations. Seeking to unveil pregnancy in all its possible circumstances, Galli’s collection promised to provide a means for mapping and clarifying the uncertainties and ambiguities that proverbially characterised the complex domains of generation and pregnancy. It also enacted a special form of midwifery training that presupposed blindfolding the midwives who practised on the models. Defining a multifunctional space of both curiosity and training practice, the collection mediated anatomical knowledge of generation and pregnancy to lay viewers as well as to midwives and medical students. In 1757, it was purchased by pope Benedict XIV, who donated it to the Bolognese Institute of the Sciences. This paper considers the early history of Galli’s midwifery collection in light of changing views of the pregnant body and shifting midwifery practices and licensing regulations.

Historians have drawn attention to early modern views of the pregnant body as an ambiguous body whose uncertain signs changed in unforeseeable and potentially deceitful ways. In the mid-eighteenth-century, midwifery collections staged visually impressive material archives of the pregnant body that promised to mark the triumph of anatomical knowledge over the proverbially elusive character of early modern corporealities. This paper reconstructs how models’ visualizations of pregnancy participated in shaping views of the female body while, at the same time, re-defining midwives’ realms of competence and expertise. It suggests that by spelling out the uncertainties and mysteries of the pregnant body, Galli’s collection translated midwifery tacit, gestural knowledge into a demonstrative regime of learning that created new forms of transfer and control of midwifery knowledge.