ABSTRACT
A simple index of the eighteenth-century change is the publication of original midwifery treatises. There are two traditional explanations for the change: fashion and the forceps. Man-midwifery spread, it is alleged, by the process of fashion. At first adopted at the top of the social scale, it diffused downwards by a process of envious emulation — the "aping the quality" so much bemoaned and practised in Hanoverian England. The alternative explanation is the midwifery forceps. Since its invention in the early seventeenth century, this instrument had been kept secret by its inventors and possessors, the successive generations of the Chamberlen family. But in the early eighteenth century, the forceps spread to other practitioners, and once its design was published in 1733–35, it was available for a few pounds from any competent instrument-maker. Indeed, recent research suggests that the man-midwifery of eighteenth-century England was almost unique, apart from Britain's American colonies.
