History of the Chair of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children in the University of Edinburgh : an introductory lecture / by Alexander Russell Simpson.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of the Chair of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children in the University of Edinburgh : an introductory lecture / by Alexander Russell Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Tliis document—a monument at once to the foresight and enterprise of Mr Thomas Gibson and the Corporation of Surgeons, who conceived the idea of founding such a Chair, and to the wisdom and thrift of the Town Council, which forthwith established without endowing it,—the document gives us an insight into the conditions under which this most important addition to the University equipment was inaugurated. We can see from it that the practice of midwifery was mainly in the hands of irresponsible women. We can see, further, that these women had had no regular training, and we can easily guess how often and how grievously they must have blundered at their delicate task. But we see also that the medical practitioners were Avaking up to recognise that midwifery is an integral and an important part of the medical profession, and they set before themselves the double duty of giving the female midwives proper instruction, and providing for the due training of medical students in this department. AccoucHEUfis versus Midwives. What was then to be seen in the small capital of this small kingdom was at the same time to be seen in the big, wide world. Through all the lengthened ages women had had the undivided, undisputed control of the process of child-birth. Surgeons and physicians, learned with the learning of their time, were caring for all the other sores and sicknesses of humanity. But when a woman had to endure the uttermost agony to which flesh is heir, when she had to go through a process that is natural, certainly, and commonly safe, but that is sometimes dangerous as a battle- field or deadly as a plague, then she was left to the questionable care of an untrained female. Individual midwives may have gathered much experience and acquired exceptional skill, but they did not commit their knowledge to writing, or hand it on to grow and develop with the progress of the ages. What obstetric literature existed was scattered in the pages of various authors, who devoted occasional chapters to the special diseases of women, to the disorders of pregnancy, or to the management of difficult labours ; but natural labour still waited scientific treatment. The most important obstetrical writings of the earlier physicians and surgeons were collected first by Caspar Wolf in 1566, and subsequently in a more complete form by Israel Spach in a volume which he published at Strasburg in 1597 under the designation Gyneciorum. It was at the very commencement of that sixteenth century, in the year 1513, that tlie first work exclusively devoted to midwifery was published in Latin by Eucharius Ehodion. It was translated into various languages for the benefit of the midwives, who thus for the first time had something like a text- book put at their disposal It does not appear that they were in a hurry to avail themselves of it, and we can see with what a