ABSTRACT
Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century writers on the diseases of women, both medical men and female midwives, regarded the field as encompassing all that women experienced, from the diseases of virgins to the processes of childbirth, including the health of very young babies. A similar range existed in the works of eighteenthcentury men-midwives, which contain much information on the reality of childbirth and women’s diseases in the early modern period, making it clear that their apparent professional focus on the final stages of labour should not be seen as exclusive. For example, they could be asked to supply birth control information to a husband and wife exhausted by a series of births of dead children; William Smellie, approached in this way in 1730, attacked the ‘ridiculous opinion [that] prevails among the vulgar, that there are certain remedies to procure barrenness, and indeed such described by many of the oldest authors’ and warned that such remedies were just a way to ‘throw away money’.1 Rather than only being asked to cure sterility, medical men at this time were also invited to bring it about. In this and the following chapter, I want to consider the status of ‘the oldest authors’ more generally in the works of men-midwives, and in particular in that of Smellie. Adrian Wilson has identified the years immediately around 1750 as a time when some practitioners were still involved only in those obstetric emergencies considered too difficult by midwives, usually ending with the delivery of a dead baby, but others were now working as the first port of call in labours that were expected to proceed normally.2 I shall discuss how, in precisely these years of what Irvine Loudon has called the ‘obstetric revolution’ when one type of man-midwife was being replaced by another,3 a debate developed about obstetric practice in which the correct use of history became a mark of the good man-midwife, and the Gynaeciorum libri found new uses. In what Wilson has called this ‘unexplained revolution’, I will argue that the revolutionary propaganda involved the use of
1 William Smellie, A Collection of Preternatural Cases and Observations in
Midwifery (London, 1764), pp. 258-9. 2 Wilson, The Making of Man-midwifery, p. 168.
