Bourgeois managed the birth of Nicolas Henri, Duke of Orléans, on 16 April 1607.
On 16 April 1607, Louise Bourgeois attended the birth of Nicolas Henri, Duke of Orléans, the fourth child born to Henry IV and Marie de Medici. Though the young duke would tragically die in childhood, his birth was another entry in Bourgeois's remarkable, unbroken sequence of successful royal deliveries.
This delivery further solidified Bourgeois's standing at court as an indispensable figure in the reproductive health of the French royal family. Her consistent success across multiple high-stakes pregnancies, occurring in a period when childbirth mortality was a constant threat even for the most privileged women in Europe, distinguished her from her contemporaries and elevated the professional status of midwifery itself.
The trust placed in Bourgeois by the royal household reflected not merely her technical competence but also her documented practice of careful observation and record-keeping, habits that would later inform her groundbreaking published works. Her attentiveness to the particularities of each birth, including complications and recovery, provided a foundation of empirical case knowledge unusual for the period.
This delivery is significant historically as part of the continuous documentary record establishing Bourgeois as the primary attendant for all of Marie de Medici's pregnancies, a record she would leverage to establish her authority as the first practicing midwife to publish her own clinical observations.