If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home Read Online Free PDF

misgivings about the forceps. The Ladies Dispensatory, or Every Women Her Own Physician (1739) recommended they be employed only in extreme circumstances, defined as cases where labour had lasted for four or five days.
    The male physician began steadily to usurp the midwife’s ground, even if he had much less practical experience, and gradually took control over childbirth away from women. A minister named Hugh Adams, of Durham, New Hampshire, claimed to have sorted out a very difficult confinement in 1724. He was called in after a midwife had despaired of a three-and-a-half-day labour, even though he had never delivered a child before. He performed his miracle only with some ‘strong Hysterick medicines’ and the knowledge he had gleaned from reading a few books.
    Circumstances like these caused ‘Old Wives’ Tales’ to begin to take on their modern reputation for inaccuracy and fallibility. Yet the male midwife would remain a figure of much suspicion throughout the Georgian period. The idea that another man would see his wife’s private parts was troubling to many husbands. In satirical caricatures, the male midwife was often depicted with his ranks of medicine bottles, many of them containing sedatives which he used to knock out women in order to have his wicked way with them ( plate 9 ).
    As male doctors gradually took over more of the responsibility for delivering babies from the midwife, the design of the birthing chair began to change. A lower chair is better for a woman giving birth, as she can brace her feet against the floor. Its drawback is that the midwife has to bend down low, ‘always leaning forward and bent over, with hands stretched out, watching for the foetus to appear’. But from around 1700, when doctors began to take over, birth chairs started to have longer legs. These higher chairs meant the physicians didn’t need to stoop, but they were less comfortable for the woman. Eventually mothers were encouraged to lie down flat on their beds and push, instead of to sit and use gravity. It strikes one as being more to the benefit of doctor than patient.

    A seventeenth-century birthing chair from the Wellcome Collection, London
    Pain relief in Tudor times lay in the power ofprayer. Westminster Abbey’s ‘Girdle of Our Lady’ was sometimes lent by its abbot to ladies in labour, such as Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor. They might also turn to recipes such as John Partridge’s optimistically named herbal potion ‘to make women have a quick and speedy deliverance of their children, and without pain, or at least very little’. Georgian ladies could rely on the rather more efficacious ‘liquid laudanum’ – opium dissolved in alcohol. It was completely legal, and Dr John Jones’s The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d called the drug ‘a sage and noble panacea’. Queen Victoria popularised the use of chloroform during birth, but did so in the face of enormous moral pressure not to ‘succumb’ to this ‘weakness’. Many of her subjects thought that ‘to be insensible from whisky, gin, and brandy, and wine, and beer and ether and chloroform, is to be what in the world is called Dead-drunk’, something shameful whatever the circumstances. However, the rational and scientific Charles Darwin administered chloroform to his own wife himself during her labours.
    Even after people began to understand that invisible germs might be carried into a bedroom upon seemingly clean hands, there was great opposition among doctors to changing their habits. In 1865, the Female Medical Society asked that doctors refrain from coming straight from the dissecting room to the birthing room, but a riposte in The Lancet claimed that it was entirely unnecessary: it was not infection but a woman’s ‘mental emotion’ or overexcitement that caused puerperal fever. The Tudor practice of remaining in bed after the birth was still followed: a book entitled Advice to a Wife , published in 1853, recommended that a new mother