ABSTRACT
The Chamberlens' three instruments worked in different ways to achieve the same effect – the delivery of a living child in obstructed births by the head. The instruments are: vectis, midwifery forceps, fillet. Until the 1690s, there is no indication that anyone outside the Chamberlen family possessed the forceps or Vectis. Yet by the early 1730s, various forms of these instruments were being used by other practitioners in the Dutch Republic, in France, and in England. The provenance of all these instruments is highly obscure: only one individual claimed independent invention, and all the others concealed the means whereby they had acquired the instruments. In the Dutch Republic it is known that Hugh Chamberlen I sold both instruments around 1694 to a party of surgeons led by Rogier van Roonhuysen, and that Roonhuysen and his successors maintained a tradition of secret sale until about 1750.
