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From research conducted within the framework of a PhD thesis (Mad of motherhood. Theories and practices of internment around the diagnosis of puerperal insanity, seventeenth-twentieth centuries, France, Italy), I want to examine some more general questions around the history of medicine and gender. The history of a diagnosis, eminently feminine, considered from the perspective of long-term, allows us to problematize certain medical concepts and to understand differently the periodization of gender history. Motherhood is often considered a fixed biological category, taking into account more of social and cultural aspects that have surrounded over time. While, from the seventeenth century, physicians are wondering precisely what are the elements that characterize the maternity.Thus considered, we realize that motherhood was never thought by the medical discourse, as a physiological process but often as a pathological event or a disorder, a discontinuity in women’s lives. It is rather the attempt to understand and supervise the motherhood in natural sphere, which has gradually built its biological fixity, while it is reported, since the beginning, its anomalies and its strangeness.