ABSTRACT
It was not very ethical, for an English accoucheur as famous as Hugh I Chamberlen, momentarily in Paris, to try and sell to the French Government (for 10 000 scudi) a family secret jealously held for nearly a century. It was, he argued, a portentous secret: an instrument with which a woman in labour ‘could be delivered in eight minutes’. Hugh’s motivation for effecting the sale was anything but humanitarian. His whole family was heavily involved in the consequences of a financial disaster amounting to bankruptcy. At the time (1670), obstetrical and perinatal mortality were rampant in Paris; and the Government, well aware of the fact, was more concerned with actuarial figures than with Dr Chamberlen’s questionable ethics. Thus a meeting was arranged between the owner of the secret instrument and Dr F Mauriceau, then regarded as ‘the oracle of accoucheurs of his century’. And who can tell that it was not Mauriceau himself, aware of Chamberlen’s practices, to attract him to France—partly to find out more about the business and partly, perhaps, to discredit him with malice aforethought?
