Digital Highlights: God’s revenge against murder! Or, the tragical histories and horrid cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg, midwife, to Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, & Mary Clifford, her three apprentices

Frontispiece from God’s revenge against murder! Or, the tragical histories and horrid cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg, midwife, to Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, & Mary Clifford, her three apprentices. London, 1767? From the Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

Medical jurisprudence is among the subject areas from which the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine has selected titles to be digitized. This image also tangentially represents another topic on which the Center will focus its digitization efforts, namely obstetrics.

Elizabeth Brownrigg, a midwife in 18^th-century London, was executed for her cruel mistreatment of orphaned children apprenticed to her in order to be trained as domestic servants. The Center’s holdings in medical jurisprudence include many pamphlets describing lurid trials such as this one, from its Boston Medical Library collection.

To view this and other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, go to the Internet Archive, click on “Texts” on the top of the page, then enter the search tag “medicalheritagelibrary.”

Link to: God’s revenge against murder! Or, the tragical histories and horrid cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg, midwife, to Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, & Mary Clifford, her three apprentices at http://www.archive.org/details/godsrevengeagain00brow.