Eucharius Rösslin

Eucharius Rösslin (Roslin, Rößlin), sometimes known as Eucharius Rhodion, (c. 1470 – 1526) was a German physician who in 1513 wrote a book about childbirth called Der Rosengarten (The Rose Garden), which became a standard medical text for midwives. Its full title was Der schwangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosengarten (The rose garden of pregnant women and midwives).

Midwifery Rösslin was an apothecary at Freiburg before being elected physician to the city of Frankfurt on Main in 1506. He served as physician to the city of Worms in the service of Katherine, wife of Henry IV, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. While examining and supervising the city's midwives, he found their practice of midwifery to be careless and substandard, leading to high rates of infant mortality. As a result, he wrote his book in German, to make it accessible, and published it in the then-German city of Strasbourg. He included in it engravings by Martin Caldenbach, a pupil of Albrecht Dürer. Der Rosengarten gave for the first time printed illustrations of the birthing chair, the lying-in chamber, and the positions of the fetus in utero.

Alongside his direct observation of midwifery at Worms, Rösslin incorporated information gleaned from writers of antiquity such as Muscio and Soranus of Ephesus. In the introductory prologue to the text, written in verse, Rösslin emphasizes the importance of the role of men in reproduction and blames midwives who "through neglect and oversight... destroy children far and wide." He threatens midwives with a warning that God will call them to account. "And since no midwife that I've asked / Could tell me anything of her task / I'm left to my medical education." The book has "notably negative views of female midwives and mothers in favour of a male-led science of child birth".

Success The book was an immediate success. By the mid-16th century, it had been translated into all the main European languages and had gone through numerous editions.

It appeared in English in 1540 as The Byrth of Mankynde, translated by Richard Jonas. An expanded English version of 1545 has a "repeated emphasis of the importance of the mother. This is absent from the German original".

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