Phantoms of race: Shibata Kōichi’s models, midwifery and racial discourse in late nineteenth-century medical culture

By the late nineteenth century, professionalised, institutionalised, masculine medicine was cementing its dominance both in Europe, and around the globe. Midwifery, traditionally a female profession practiced in private homes within local communities, was being regulated, circumscribed, institutionalised, and established in a subordinate position within the medical hierarchy. Simultaneously, the pregnant body became politicised, inscribed into national, ethnic and racial narratives. European models of medical practice and training spread around the globe as part of the wider cultural and power dynamics of “world society”, where colonialising powers cemented notions of ‘Western’ intellectual superiority, pushing other nations to confront with new civilizational standards. Where European medicine reached, midwifery practice and training followed similar patterns of change. Yet at the same time, it became an arena for the development of individualised cultures of nationhood, public health, race and eugenics. This chapter explores the global cultures of midwifery, obstetrics and race in the late nineteenth century through a case study, on Shibata Kōichi (柴田耕一 , 1860-?) and his Geburtshülfliche Taschen-Phantome (Obstetrical Pocket-Phantom; Sanka mokei: kamisei shūchin 産科模型 : 紙製袖珍). Shibata, a Japanese doctor who, between 1888 and 1891, studied and worked in Munich, specialised in obstetrics. He was one of many medical students who travelled from Japan to Germany in the wake of the forced opening of Japan’s borders to foreign commerce in the 1850s. What made his experience stand out was the fact that, while in Munich, with the collaboration of his mentor, Dr Franz von Winckel, he published a slim pamphlet, which offered instruction in the techniques of delivery for both obstetrical students and midwives. The pamphlet contained two paper dolls – lithographs printed on both sides and articulated with metal pins – which could be used to model the different presentations of the fetus in the pelvis. The ‘phantoms’ were meant to be an easy-to-use, ‘pocket’ version of the three-dimensional models used to teach obstetrics in medical and midwifery schools all over the world. Between 1891 and 1914, several editions were published in Munich, Philadelphia, Montreal, and Tokyo, as well as being copied and circulated in manuscript form. This chapter offers the first biography of Shibata and bibliography of his work, shedding light on a significant but still rather obscure contributor to the field of medicine in Meiji period Japan, and providing new insight for scholars of Meiji physicians and their practice. This chapter analyses Shibata’s experience as an obstetrician operating across different medical cultures, at a time when the Japanese government was looking at the adoption of German standards of medicine as a tool for the “modernization” of the country, and was pushing for a new, “modern” obstetrical culture as grounds for the growth of the nation. It compares different editions of the pamphlet, and their intended aims and audiences, discussing how the work can give us an insight into global cultures of medical education and publishing, and into the standardisation of midwifery as a practice across the world. Lastly, reflecting on the way in which the fetus is represented through the phantoms, and contextualising it in a larger discussion of the place of midwifery, models and books in national political and social health projects, it investigates how a small articulated model of a fetus could be an agent in the creation of cultures of race and racism in the late nineteenth century.