The state registration of midwives, and their power to practise independently of the medical profession / by R. Reid Rentoul.

  • Rentoul, Robert, 1939-
Date:
[1891]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The state registration of midwives, and their power to practise independently of the medical profession / by R. Reid Rentoul. 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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    confinements be handed over for the training of pupil midwives. I wish to show that this cannot be done. Supposing that yearly 13001 senior medical students are each required to attend thirty confinements, this would use up 39,000 cases. Last year there were 48,084 confinements at 54 lying-in hospitals and charities with maternity departments in the United Kingdom. You will therefore see that if you allow this Bill to pass, a great propor- tion of the confinements must be used up for the teaching of the midwife, and that the student’s education must suffer. If we look at the effects this proposed legislation would have on the medical practitioner, it will be seen that it would prove as disastrous to him as to the student; for if all the normal confinements are taken by the midwife, he will not have the power of using these whereby to improve the imperfect education which he received at college. Moreover, if he is not permitted to conduct normal cases, how will he be able to recognise and treat abnormal and complicated labours ? Physicians and surgeons would object to such restrictions. There is a higher standpoint from which we should look on this proposal—I refer to the pecuniary. Practically this is the highest, for if a fair income cannot be made, only very inferior men will enter the profession. In this way the public will be the eiiief sufferers. Moreover, if work is not well paid, then it is generally badly done, and I go so far as to say that if the public wish to have good medical services, they must see that the doctor is in receipt of such income as will keep him fairly free from financial difficulties, and out of such a state as will make him look on disease as a perfect godsend. I am aware there are a few doctors who, in their desire to starve their neighbours out, propose handing over all normal labours to the midwife, and never by any means to the junior practitioner—just as some propose to hand over pharmacy to the chemists. Suppos- ing we apply this statement to the profession in Liverpool— that all normal labours are to be conducted by the midwife. Spiegelberg states that 97 of every 100 confinements are normal. During 1888 there were 17,777 births registered in 1 This does not include the number of students rejected—who number one- third of the 1300.
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