ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that London men-midwives were divided, from before 1720 until after 1740, between Tory forceps practitioners and Court Whig supporters of Hendrik van Deventer. It will emerge that the various initiatives of the 1720s and '30s were reflections of the conflict between these two opposing camps, and not, as they seem at first to modern eyes, parts of a single movement towards fully-fledged man-midwifery or towards modern obstetrics. John Douglas's Short account of the state of midwifery in London and Westminster, published in 1736, is of special interest — both as the first explicit London response to the forceps and for its remarkable contents. Douglas's plan of instruction for midwives was never realized; yet only three years later, in 1739, Sir Richard Manningham set up in London the first Lying-In Infirmary. Manningham's Exact diary made the cunning aspersion that only Douglas had been taken in; Douglas's responding Advertisement was a delicate attempt to refute th.
