ABSTRACT
Of all the early forceps practitioners, William Giffard alone bequeathed a substantial case-series from which one might reconstruct his practice. As record of his practice, Giffard's case-series fell into several phases. In the first phase, he seems to have recorded his cases only intermittently: many months are blank, and even those months for which cases are recorded usually only show one or two cases. These cases were recorded selectively, for they include very few births by the head. Yet the effects of the forceps were contained within two important boundaries. First, different though the new practice was, it was profoundly rooted in the very realm which it superseded. Secondly, it may look as if forceps man-midwifery displaced the midwife — but this was far from being the case. What the forceps dictated — both as practical reality and, reaching still further, male ambition — was not the displacement of the midwife, but rather new equilibrium between midwives and male practitioners.
