Malay midwifery. The conditions of life on a Torres Straits island / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1900?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Malay midwifery. The conditions of life on a Torres Straits island / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    MALAY MIDWIFERY.1 BY CHARLES S. MYERS. In every kctmpong (village) there is a midwife. During the seven months of pregnancy the Malay woman calls her in. The midwife pays frequent visits until the commencement of labour- pains, determining meanwhile the position of the foetus from the hardness of the foetal head, ascertaining its viability by feeling its movements and by listening (with the ear directly touching the abdomen) to the sounds of the foetal heart. The Malay midwife considers the vertex-presentation to be the most favourable. Breech cases are uncertain. The oblique position of the foetus is always dangerous. She thinks it a load sign when the head is felt to be backwards (Poccipito- posterior cases). When the pains first come on, the midwife attempts to convert a dangerous position into another more favourable. “ Sometimes ” she is unsuccessful, and the mother is left to take her chance. Version is performed by the external method ; under no circumstances does the midwife introduce her hand into the vagina. The woman is confined in an ordinary dwelling-room. A binder is put around her belly. Her back is supported so that it assumes a semi-recumbent posture, whereby the blood is prevented “from rising out of the womb.” A cloth is hung above her head for her to pull upon. On each side of the woman the midwife places an assistant, whose duty it is to press on the abdomen, so as to keep the legs of the foetus from separating. As the head is passing over the perineum, a stone wrapped in cloth is pressed into the mother’s anus by the midwife. 1 I am indebted to Mr. Charles Hose, the Resident of Baram, Sarawak, not only for frequent aid as an interpreter, but also for affording me an opportunity of meeting the midwife, from whom, during an afternoon’s talk, with the use of as few leading questions as possible, I obtained the somewhat fragmentary notes that form the basis of this paper. — THE CHARLES MYERS