Making unexpected connections is what Associate Professor of History Lisa Cody's work is all about, with scholarly interests including science and medicine, politics, art, literature, economics, and law. Her forthcoming book, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2004), integrates these domains, tracing two intertwined narratives that shaped 18th-century British life: the development of the modern British state, and the emergence of the male midwife as the preeminent authority over matters of sexual behavior, reproduction, and childbirth.

Birthing the Nation examines politics, economics, and culture through the lens of 18th-century ideas about reproduction, childbirth, midwifery, and the emerging medical profession. Matters of life and death, Cody demonstrates, were integral to both literal and metaphorical questions on identity. In a monarchy arbitrated by its official religion, the Church of England, regulation of childbirth and reproduction was vital to the very notion of British culture, challenged as it was by Catholicism, the French Revolution, and social change.

To tell this multifaceted story, Cody spent years doing archival research, supported in part by a Faculty Summer Research Fellowship from the Family of Benjamin Z. Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. Working in libraries and archives in the United States, Britain, and France, she examined primary documents including medical treatises, newspapers, journals, novels, plays, satirical cartoons, and court records. "I'm very passionate about historical scholarship," Cody says. "I love being in the archives, finding strange documents or cartoons and trying to make sense of the past. It's a very different place."

Building on existing scholarship, Cody investigates the historical problems posed by tectonic changes in 18th-century political, economic, and social life. Exploring questions of sexuality and reproduction, Cody demonstrates that male midwives were, in practice, quite empathetic toward their female patients—an argument that takes issue with some feminist scholarship. On this point Rachel Weil, associate professor of history at Cornell University and author of Political Passions, says, "Cody takes a subject previously treated under the rubric of women's history and puts it at the center of the political, economic, and cultural history of 18th-century Britain. That middleclass women increasingly turned to male obstetricians is already well-established. But that Edmund Burke and Adam Smith attended lectures on obstetrics, or that male midwives were ubiquitous figures in political satire, are facts that have not been commonly known nor taken seriously."

A member of the faculty since 1996, Cody has written and researched an array of articles, essays, book reviews, and conference papers, and has won research fellowships and prizes including the Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Judith Lee Ridge Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians.

Now that her book is in press with Oxford, Cody will explore the adventures of an 18th-century Italian castrato, Ferdinando Tenducci, who married, and later divorced, a 14-year-old, Irish, Protestant girl. "It's a great story of this scandalous couple whose personal lives tie into major political events and cultural conflicts, particularly because their divorce occurred during and symbolically paralleled issues raised by the American Revolution," says Cody.

Balancing her scholarly program with a commitment to the undergraduates she teaches, Cody aims to inspire her students and instill in them a love of history just as her professors once did. When Cody entered Harvard, determined to become a physician, she took a history course for her general education requirement, London and Paris in the 19th Century, which she says changed her life: "I was sitting in my history class, taught by the late Professor John Clive. He read Thomas Gray's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, written in 1751 in Britain. I was captivated by the poem's power to celebrate the lives of ordinary, easily forgotten villagers doing the most mundane tasks, and by the professor's use of this poem to show the historian's enterprise: to bring the dead to life."

The course that so changed Cody's own undergraduate career now is among her favorites to teach, but she also enjoys the challenges of teaching outside her area of scholarly interest. "I specialize in 18th-century British history, with an emphasis on the history of medicine, but my courses in European history range across six centuries and five countries," Cody explains.

"The great advantage of teaching broadly is being able to analyze with my students how small and interconnected developments over time lead to quite explosive transformations in history. The 18th-century shift from female to male midwives in the British Isles is one of these quite strange, but extremely important watersheds in the history of medicine, the family, gender, and political culture.

"Yet it is really only explicable when placed into a much broader and longer context of religious and economic conflict, nation, and empire building. I'm not sure I would have discovered these connections," Cody said, "had I only been teaching narrowly in 18th-century British history at a research university."

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Farmer George Deliver'd of a most Grevous S[peec]h, with the Cruelty of the GOSSOPS. 1787. George III is shown as an exhausted mother having just given birth to his baby, the annual address to Parliament, which is viciously torn apart by members of Parliament dressed as midwives and "gossips," women who traditionally attended childbirth.