Man-midwifery exposed, or the danger and immorality of employing men in midwifery proved and the remedy for the evil found : addressed to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. / By John Stevens.
- John Stevens
- Date:
- [1866]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Man-midwifery exposed, or the danger and immorality of employing men in midwifery proved and the remedy for the evil found : addressed to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. / By John Stevens. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![occupy towards their patients precisely the same relation as that of the general practitioner, who, in London, has similar facilities for occasionally resorting to an eminent obstetrician. What, then, is the cause of the comparative immunity from death which appears among that class which woidd appear to be in every way the least favourably circumstanced? It cannot be supposed that more knowledge or more skill is possessed by these comparatively uneducated women than by educated medical men. Some have been disposed to ascribe un- favourable results to the nervous derangement which upon these occasions is often obseiwed in susceptible women upon the entrance of an attendant of the other sex, and there may be something in this; but in my opinion the death-rate among patients attended by gentlemen in general practice arises from infection with various animal poisons. These gentlemen are necessarily exposed to personal contamination from attending other patients with infectious diseases, from dressing certain wounds, from making post-mortem examinations, and other duties ; and hence, however careful they may be, febrile infection is frequently carried to the patients whom they may attend. This is the real source of many of those tmaccountable deaths which occur to healthy women a week or so after an apparently safe and simple delivery. It is a never-ceasing but unsuspected source of mortality, and so subtle is the infection that sometimes all the patients of a particular surgeon wiU continue to prove tmfortunate, until the women become alarmed and refuse to em- ploy him. The remedy is to separate the general practice of midwifery from that of medicine and surgery, and this can be done best by encouraging the employment of women in the general practice of midwifery, with the understanding that they call in obstetric physicians to that small percentage of cases which really require any serious interference. It is also necessary to establish a coUege of midwifery, where well educated women may obtain the same facihties for study as those which have hitherto been accessible only to men. By this arrangement a large amount of our most valuable fe- male Hfe would be saved; a lucrative employment would be placed in the hands of our unoccupied women, and the feelings of a large number of delicate minded persons would be saved from an unnecessary ordeal. I am, sir, your obedient servant, 4, Fitzroy-square. James Edmunds, MD. [Note.] To obtain amore perfect comparison between the returns of the Charity and those of the rest of London, the births and deaths from the Charity must be deducted from the general retiirns, of which, of course, they form a part; and we then get the following death rates:—The patients of the Charity die from puerperal causes at the rate of 1 in every 556 births • while](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24750840_0077.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
