The 17th century was a watershed moment for midwives in the City of London for it was in this period that the entrance of men into the field of midwifery started to become prevalent. And these male physicians were no longer appearing in the lying-in chamber with their metal instruments only to attend to difficult or obstructed deliveries, mainly to forcibly extract still-borns, which had been the case up until then. The factors that promoted this transition from what had been an almost exclusive female space into one in which men were increasingly present is a story that is still to be told in full.
In what follows, we shall see that on the one hand, midwives, in contrast to their male medical colleagues—barber-surgeons, physicians and apothecaries—were repeatedly prevented from organizing themselves into a professional organization which would have set general standards and provided a means for educating and licensing its members. On the other hand, we will encounter evidence of several attempts on the part of influential medical practitioners, namely, members of the Chamberlen family, to organize the midwives and at least in one instance, in which this was specifically to gain control over them so that a man-midwife would be solely in charge of their licensing and training. The latter attempt was resisted by the midwives themselves who were intent on creating an autonomous corporation. At the same time their efforts to organize themselves as an independent entity were continuously thwarted by the powerful College of Physicians.
Into this mix came detractors and supporters of the midwives. On one side was Dr. Peter Chamberlen (1601-1683), a royal physician and outspoken proponent of man-midwives who initiated an unsuccessful attempt to gain control over these women. His efforts are well documented while on the other extreme we find Nicholas Culpeper (1615-1654), an equally outspoken critic but of the elitism of physicians such as Chamberlen, as well as of the efforts of the latter to introduce men into the field of midwifery. As we will also see, the controversy over the role of women in midwifery is also a conflict closely tied to the publication of numerous manuals, written in the vernacular, supposedly directed at educating a reading public that included midwives themselves, although also consumed by male medical practitioners and members of the public in general.
Unquestionably, the most important family to enter the field of man-midwifery was that of the Chamberlens whose invention of the obstetrical forceps—which they kept secret for a century—gave them a significant advantage over other man-midwives who were in competition with them at the time. Until now, studies of midwifery in England have focused on the Chamberlen family and have documented primarily external manifestations of the conflict. In contrast, this study will examine a more hidden side of the controversy, more specifically the way that one of the most important and widely translated works of the 16th and 17th centuries, called Examen de ingenios, found its way into one of the more important manuals for midwives, namely, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged.