'The pregnant women are here for the sake of the teaching institution': The lying-in hospital of Göttingen University, 1751 to c. 1830.

Abstract

Drawing on the admission records, the medical casebooks and the publications of its director, this article explores how the University of Göttingen's maternity hospital achieved its three official goals: teaching medical students, training female midwives, and providing shelter for needy parturient women. Since educating medical men was the most important aim of the hospital, the paper particularly focuses on how the demands of instruction shaped day-to-day obstetrical practices, especially under the directorship of Professor Friedrich Benjamin Osiander (1792-1822). He was a keen advocate of the forceps, whereas the first director, Professor Johann Georg Roederer (1751-63), had taken a moderate, that is a much less interventionist, approach to obstetrics. Osiander avowedly was determined to subordinate the parturient women to the demands of the clinic and to treat them as 'living manikins'. In spite of that, there is evidence that the pregnant and parturient women, most of whom were unmarried and from the lower classes, made use of the lying-in hospital for their own purposes, and that sometimes they refused to play the role assigned to them. The link between the maternity hospital and the rise of the man-midwife and of 'scientific' obstetrics appears to have been particularly strong in the case of Göttingen and other German university hospitals, compared with lying-in hospitals in other countries where the link was more indirect.