Delivered Gaston, Duke of Orléans

On 25 April 1608, Louise Bourgeois attended the birth of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, the fifth child of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. Gaston would later play a significant role in French politics as a perennial rival to his brother Louis XIII and a central figure in numerous court intrigues throughout the seventeenth century.

This successful delivery, occurring just one year after the birth of Nicolas Henri, exemplifies the extraordinary demands placed on Bourgeois as the sole trusted midwife for the queen across nearly a decade of near-continuous royal pregnancies. Her ability to manage this workload while maintaining an unblemished record of safe deliveries speaks to both her stamina and her expertise.

Historians note that Bourgeois's meticulous attention to each birth, later reflected in her detailed published case observations, helped establish new standards for professional midwifery practice in France. Her work anticipated later developments in obstetric record-keeping and clinical observation that would become standard practice only centuries later.

Gaston's birth is one of the final entries in Bourgeois's sequence of royal deliveries for Marie de Medici, coming shortly before the birth of the queen's final child. The cumulative weight of these successful royal births underpinned Bourgeois's unprecedented decision, just a year later, to publish her observations in print, an act that broke new ground for women's authorship in medicine.