Medical women : a thesis and a history / by Sophia Jex-Blake.

  • Sophia Jex-Blake
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical women : a thesis and a history / by Sophia Jex-Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    cliurcli teach and instruct the mydweifes of the very words and form of baptisme.” In 1567, the Archbishop of Canterbury granted a licence to Eleanor Pead, midwife, and required her to take a long oath to fulfil her duties faithfully; and among other things she bound herself to use the proper words at baptism, and moreover to “ use pure and clean water, and not any rose or damask water.” About this time attention seems to have been called 1 to the ignorance and incapacity of many midwives, and 1 it is curious to find that one great obstacle to improve- I ment in their education was the idea that it was highly 1 improper that matters relating to midwifery should be ] printed in the vulgar tongue, lest men and boys should iread them What, I wonder, would the modest matrons of Ithe sixteenth century think of our present arrangements t In 1547, Andrew Boorde, in his Breviary of Health, ^wishes to institute examinations for midwives, to be conducted jointly by “ the Byshoppe and a doctor of physick;” and in 1616, Dr. Peter Chamberlen proj)oses ithat “ some order may be settled by the State for the 1 instruction and civil government of midwives.” A ^generation later his son “ attempted, in direct oy>posi- 'tion to the ivishes of the College of Physicians, to ^ “ Many think it is not meete ne fitting such matters to be inti’eated of 10 plainly in our mother and vulgar language, to the dishonoure (as they lay) of womanhood, and the derision of their own secrets by the detection and discovering whereof men it reading shall be moved thereby . . . “verj” boy and knave reading them as openly as the tales of Eobin Hood.’* —The Birth of Mankynde, translated out of Latin, 1540.