ABSTRACT
It was generally assumed among people of the social classes who would call on professional attendants of repute, and who might be expected to know about and to demand the most modern and best treatment that childbirth was always painful and often dangerous. The obvious inference that patient expectation conditioned to a large extent the perception of childbirth as a painful, dramatic and dangerous process, or the reverse, was probably drawn first by Dr Grantley Dick-Read. On the psychological management of labour however, The birth of mankind gave good advice. By the end of the seventeenth century bed delivery was normal except among the poorest and most rural women, and the lithotomy position was the commonest. Obstetrics did of course change profoundly between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, two of the most obvious changes being the invention of the obstetric forceps, and the irruption of men into midwifery practice.
