Prepare to meet the ‘man-midwife’
The 18th century saw male doctors storming Britain’s delivery rooms
Women gearing up to give birth in Georgian Britain needed all the moral support they could get – and, for centuries, that support had come exclusively from one gender. Throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, the delivery room was a woman-only zone, populated by female relatives, friends and neighbours offering encouragement and advice. The father was nowhere to be seen, banished from the birthing room to wait for news elsewhere.
But then, in the 18th century, this traditionally female bastion was disrupted by the ‘man-midwife’. William Smellie (1697–1763) was the most influential of a new generation of male medical practitioners who claimed to be every bit as knowledgeable about childbirth as women. And he bolstered his claim by using a novel instrument: the forceps.
While the forceps would go on to save the lives of many mothers and babies, midwives like Sarah Stone, author of Complete Practice of Midwifery (1737), were initially sceptical about their benefits, one criticism being that they were responsible for passing on infection.
Female midwives were also suspicious about the motives of the men who made their careers, and fortunes, from contact with women when at their most vulnerable. These male arrivistes could not possibly comprehend the sensitivities of a female body, they claimed. Midwife Elizabeth Nihell was so enraged by Smellie’s presence in delivery rooms that she accused him of having “the delicate fist of a great-horse- godmother of a he-midwife”.